


The Rosary

by fluorescentgrey



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Adventure, Alternate Universe - Detectives, Alternate Universe - Noir, Alternate Universe - World War II, I think they call this "casefic", M/M, Obvious Real World Parallels, Reluctant Coworkers to Lovers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-28
Updated: 2017-12-28
Packaged: 2019-02-23 05:20:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 31,934
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13183182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey
Summary: On a Thursday in April 1943 Remus took the train from London to Birmingham, where a stately black car was waiting at the station to take him a short drive southwest to Hagley. In a wood on the estate of the Viscount Cobham of Hagley Hall four local boys hunting quail had found a woman’s skeleton in a wych elm tree.





	The Rosary

On a Thursday in April 1943 Remus took the train from London to Birmingham, where a stately black car was waiting at the station to take him a short drive southwest to Hagley. In a wood on the estate of the Viscount Cobham of Hagley Hall four local boys hunting quail had found a woman’s skeleton in a wych elm tree. One of the two wizarding detectives of the Worcestershire Constabulary had contacted the National Bureau of Magical Law Enforcement when it became clear that the victim’s left hand and shin had been removed from the body before its interring. 

The driver of the car was also a veteran. Remus asked him where he had served and received no answer, which he considered rather rude until he noticed the driver had been shot through the throat. He himself had been evacuated from Dunkirk and sent to Pianosa. He had flown numerous reconnaissance missions out of an airstrip there until… well it didn’t really do to think about it. 

The car took a left turn down a dark road shaded with thick spring foliage. Three or four police cars and a few bicycles had been left by the side of the road a few miles down, where it began to open out into the bright grey day. Here, two uniformed officers of the Constabulary had come down to meet the car. They were embroiled in tense conversation. One of them was smoking a cigarette which he held surreptitiously in a loose fist. The other had undone the collar buttons of his pressed white shirt. They both had the hunted look of having been to war and they had the feeling of wizards. The one with the cigarette dropped it and extinguished it under the heel of his boot as Remus got clumsily out of the car. “Potter,” said the cigarette one, brandishing his hand to shake. “This is Black.” 

“Lupin. Thanks for having me.” 

“They all of them think you're from Scotland Yard, so you know,” said Black. He was a little shifty and his eyes, which were very pale in color, simply would not stop moving. 

“They usually do. I am on file there as a special consultant in case any of them have questions.” 

They walked together into the cool woods and up the hill toward the site. “How well do you remember Muggle Myths and Legends from school,” Potter said conversationally. 

“Middling,” Remus told him. He had a fair grasp on Muggle mythology via his mother, who was a Muggle. Most of the rest he had learned out of textbooks and via visits from his father’s friends; he hadn’t been allowed to go to school because of the werewolf thing. Of course he had been allowed to join the army with the werewolf thing, and he had been allowed to become a cop. 

“You remember how Muggles think you can stop a witch’s spells after death by — ”

“ — burial in a hollow tree,” Remus said. “Yes, I thought that might’ve been why — ” 

“ — doesn’t explain the hand and the shin.” Black, for his part, interrupted Remus’s interruption. “We found those buried beside the tree this morning.” 

“How long has she been dead?” 

“Eighteen months,” Potter said. “The coroner’s nearly got the bones out. Our mortician’s in Kidderminster, he does a real bang up job…” 

“Any idea of cause of death yet?” 

“Asphyxiation. There was a wad of taffeta fabric in her throat.” 

“And nothing to identify her at all.” 

“Nothing at all but her bad teeth,” Black said. “The Muggles are already pulling Missing Persons and all that. And we’ve sent our only other magical deputy out to canvas every magical family in the area.” 

“So she was a witch?” 

“Pretty sure,” said Potter, at the same time Black said, “Just a feeling.” 

“The science is inexact,” Remus agreed. 

At the crime scene, cordoned with braided rope, Black chased the Muggle policemen off flapping his arms and shouting something about a special investigator from Scotland Yard. Remus was embarrassed for him and looked away down the trail toward the great estate. “Who lives there,” he asked Potter. 

“The Viscounts Cobham,” Potter said. “Family by the name of Saunders.” 

“Muggle, or — ”

“Muggles, yes. And they’ve been quite cooperative.” 

“Are they not always?” 

“These are certainly among the more patient peers in Worcestershire in my experience…” 

Once the Muggles had made themselves scarce Black waved Remus and Potter forward. “Where’d you find the hand and shin,” Remus asked. 

“Here and here, respectively.” Black or one of the Muggles had driven stakes into the ground and wrapped the tops with colorful fabric. Already the bones themselves had been excavated. “The hand bones were scattered. Here — ”

His wand was up his sleeve and he pushed it into his hand. He did a quick bit of magic so that a kind of ghost echo of the hand bones scattered through the disturbed soil. “Animals, could have been,” said Remus. 

“That’s what I’m telling him,” said Potter wryly. He had taken out another cigarette from his pocket. 

“Did you do terramancy?” 

“We need to tonight. We were hoping you might help actually.” 

“Sure, I can help.” 

“We’ve got you a room at the Six Arms,” Black said. He waved a hand and the vision of the bones disappeared. 

“What’s that?” 

“It’s a pub. They’ve rooms above for holidaymakers and such.” 

“Is the food alright?” 

Black laughed, too loudly, and stood. “No,” he said. 

Remus got up too. It was hard what with his knee, which cracked. Black and Potter noticed and looked at each other illegibly. “We need to do terramancy and spell history tonight,” Remus said, to get their minds off it. “I don’t suppose — well osteomancy can be useful too but — ”

“We usually do that only as a sort of Hail Mary,” said Potter around the cigarette. 

“Owing to the fact that the bones are evidence it’ll be difficult,” Black went on. “Not to mention it isn’t quite an exact science. We’ve done it before, though.” 

“If we must do it we should with the shin,” Remus said. “Did your officers measure the triangle — ”

“— of the tree, the shin, and the hand? Yes, they did.” 

“Have them calculate all the lengths, the angles, the area to the millimeter.” 

“For what?” 

“It’s significant,” Remus said, “the choice of bones; just her shin, not her foot, and the hand… but any kind of work would have to be quite precise.” 

“What do you mean by _work_?” 

“What was it the Muggles were saying,” Potter mused. “The Golden Hand…” 

“The Hand of Glory,” Black said. “Muggle superstition — dark magic by their understanding of the concept. Supposedly transfers the power of one individual to another.” 

“So perhaps if a Muggle killed her,” Remus conceded, not really believing it. 

“And if a wizard did?” 

“There are a number of possible reasons. We’ll know when we do the spell history. Which one of you has the best magical theory?” 

“Black does,” said Potter, at the same time Black said, “Potter does.” In a moment’s awkward silence connoting some history kindling a flame between them Potter exhaled the last of his cigarette smoke and pressed the ember out under his boot. “Neither of us took it at school,” he said. “It seemed even more… abstract than divination.” 

“They made it out to be for girls,” said Black frankly. 

Potter looked at Black reproachfully and Black looked away haughtily over the hill toward the estate. “The moral of the story is neither of us are very good,” said Potter. There was a note of vicarious apology in his voice that seemed familiar. 

“You’ll help me with it then, Detective Black,” Remus said. He wasn’t sure if he liked either of them very much, but he particularly didn’t like Black’s sexist comment. “Detective Potter, you should go with the bones to the mortician’s. Tell him we need the autopsy as quickly as possible.” 

“Why?” 

Remus had a week to solve this before the full moon. But he couldn’t very well tell them that. “The sooner we can get it to the national office the sooner we can see if it’s part of a pattern.” 

“Then what? I mean after the autopsy.” 

“Meet Black and me at this pub — the Six Arms. At eleven. Can you manage?” 

“Sure,” Potter said, “is there anything — ”

“A photograph, or a sketch of the hand bones how you found them. Like you just showed me. Is that possible?” 

“One of the Muggles will’ve made one,” Black said. 

“Right,” Remus said. “That’s all then for now.” 

They went off to corral the Muggles and the coroner who had scattered over the hill to exchange superstitious conversations. Remus stepped carefully backward, mindful of his knee on the uneven ground, until he could see the whole of the tree. It was a violent tangle, like a nest. Around it the forest floor had been brushed of leaf litter by the excavating visitors. And above it the sky was visible as shards of pale blue glass through the thick spring canopy. 

What an odd place to die, Remus thought. For a precious moment he recalled he had had a similar feeling as a child waking up alone in the woods at the very beginning of everything. 

\--

At 11:15 Potter came in to the Six Arms carrying with him through the thick wooden door the lull and chill of the omnipresent rain. Remus tried very hard not to appear visibly relieved at his presence but didn’t think he succeeded. Since they had finished the spell history and terramancy an hour previous he and Black had been attempting conversation only to find they had almost nothing in common they were willing to talk about. For fifteen minutes they had been sitting in silence staring at the embers of the fire in the grate across the still warm room. 

Potter dropped a manilla envelope (it was warm and dry from being held inside his slicker coat) on the table where it barely missed spilling Remus’s cider. “She was thirty-five,” he said, sitting down. “Five feet tall, brunette. She’d had a child. And she was wearing this.” 

He placed it carefully out of his palm onto the table. Remus picked it up and studied it in the wan light. It was a wedding ring. The gilding had rubbed off against her finger revealing cheap metal beneath. 

“She’d had a _child_ ,” Black said contemplatively. Possibly to diffuse the awkwardness, he’d had several whiskeys. 

“At least one. What did you learn from the spell history?” 

Remus had wanted to go through it but Black had insisted they leave it at the precinct office under lock and key til the morning. Still Remus had managed a cursory look over it in the car by the oily streetlight bleeding through the rain-spattered windows of Black’s car. “She wasn’t killed by magic,” he said. “But we knew that already — the taffeta.” 

“It came from her skirt,” Potter said, pulling some of the coroner’s report paperwork out of the manilla envelope. “The lining of her skirt.” 

“Let’s — Jesus. Can we talk about it in the morning?” 

Remus looked into the surface of his cider like it might tell him something. Black and Potter shared a silent look across the table. They had been friends before the war and through it, Black had said, and since they’d both been sent home they had been partnered as detectives with the Worcestershire Constabulary. In the painful silence before Potter had arrived Remus had been wondering, guiltily, if perhaps they were lovers. “Fine,” Potter said at last. “Let’s talk about it in the morning.” 

“It’s nearly Friday,” Remus said, as though they wouldn’t work through the weekend. The gin and cider had made him feel warm and magnanimous. “And there’s no more blitz in Birmingham.” 

“To no blitz in Birmingham,” said Potter. They toasted each other with a nervous warmth. 

“How bad has it been,” Remus asked. 

“It’s calmed down a bit. It was worst in ’41, ’42. There’s munitions factories in the city and all around the Midlands. They make all our planes, guns… Anyway it started as soon as we got home really. It was like we got off the beach and then — ”

Potter shut up because Black had kicked him under the table. “I was there too,” Remus said. Perhaps a little cruelly. 

Black rested his forehead in the palm of his hand exasperatedly. “Were you,” Potter said. 

“We were in the Ardennes. The French said, it’s impenetrable, et cetera, anyway we were running, and they had those huge tanks… Running for days and days. To the sea.” He swallowed. Black was watching the fire and Potter was watching Black. “Anyway,” Remus said. “I was there too.” 

The war was the only thing to speak about, he understood. It seemed that Potter and Black did too. The war, and the case, and of course the case seemed already some kind of echo of the war, somehow, likely as a function of war making itself the only thing that was, ever the self-obsessed debutante; everywhere you went war was preening in the mirror above the fireplace, in every piece of fine polished silver, in every reflecting pool, in the eyes of every beautiful woman and every handsome man; war was posing in the background of every painting, it was singing out-of-pitch inside every song, it was the static on every radio broadcast, tittering its unpretty laughter; it was smoking disgusting cigarettes in every dark alley, pissing messily in every bar, snoring during the symphony and laughing overmuch at the cinema. It had seemed to Remus since the Spitfire had gone down in Tuscany, since he had crawled off the burning wreckage dragging what remained of his leg, since he had set to stumble through the low green-grey hills of that possessed and occupied territory, blood in his eyes, in search of the strength or the magic that would allow him to Apparate to safety — since this moment it had seemed to him that war had become God. It was clear that somewhere an unseen arbiter conducted reality through delusions of grandeur and hegemony. It had always been clear but one could only truly grasp it it at the moment of death, which of course was convenient for Remus, who had experienced the moment before the moment of death numerous times. 

He faked a yawn and stood up. His head spun a little with the drink and the memory. Black was watching him with the shifty eyes stiller than Remus had yet seen. “You both should sleep,” he said. “I’ve the tab.” 

\--

In the morning on the way into the police precinct Remus heard someone calling his name in the street. It was Potter. 

“You’ve got to forgive Sirius,” he said. It took Remus a moment to realize he was talking about Black. “He got hit in the head in Belgium. He doesn’t do human interaction really anymore.” 

Remus was surprised at his forthrightness. “It’s quite alright.” 

“But it isn’t alright. It’s got us in trouble more than once. I don’t want him to drive you away.” 

“I’m obligated to be here by contract,” Remus reminded him. “Until the crime is solved or they summon me back.” 

“Still,” Potter said. “Don’t let him make you feel — unwelcome.” 

Remus was accustomed to feeling unwelcome as the wizarding deputies at most rural police precincts wholeheartedly resented interference from the Ministry and made this resentment abundantly clear. “I won’t,” he told Potter. “Thank you.” 

The man in question was waiting for them on the steps of the precinct. The sight of Remus and Potter approaching together had narrowed his eyes and furrowed his brow. Potter apparently read something different out of it than Remus did. “What’s happened?” he asked. 

“Sabotage,” Black responded, standing, brushing crumbs from his grey wool trousers. He fixed Remus with a long sideways look. 

Potter, evidently accustomed to conversations of this variety, asked again: “What’s happened?” 

They went inside. The walls were painted in glossy drab olive tones, like an old schoolhouse. Black and Potter shared an office toward the rear. They all three filed into the small, dim room and shut the door. Remus could hear the low buzz of covert silencing charms. Both desks were stacked with papers and files and notepads and old coffee mugs in which milk and sugar had congealed, napkins illustrating prints of a woman’s lipstick, framed photographs turned face-down, wrappers of wizarding sweets strewn about in a manner that no doubt violated the International Statute of Secrecy, and, most damningly of all, a moving Holyhead Harpies poster on the wall. 

“It’s Disillusioned to Muggle eyes,” Potter said, noticing where Remus was looking. “Don’t worry about — ”

“It’s gone,” Black interrupted. “The terramancy and spell history notes are gone.” 

“Gone?” 

“Yes — I put them right here on my desk last night, didn’t I, Lupin.” 

“He did. Who else is magic working here?” 

“Just one — Pettigrew. But he was canvassing all yesterday — ”

“Don’t chalk up any actual mental faculty to that sod,” Black said bitterly. 

“We have to,” Remus explained, like to a child, “if it was on your desk — ”

“There wasn't any magical protection on it,” Black mumbled. Potter swore under his breath and kicked nothing on the floor. “They _know_ not to touch my desk,” he yelled, as though it might reach the ears out in the bullpen as a veiled threat even through the silencing charms. 

“So it could be anyone here,” said Remus acidly. “Easy enough to _Obliviate_ them. And to do the terramancy and spell history again.” 

“That’s the other thing,” Black said. He was rifling through the papers now as though he might uncover something he’d missed. “The Saunderses rang.” 

\--

In an hour’s time Remus and Black arrived at the gate of the grand estate of Hagley Hall. It had begun to rain and the low grey clouds cast the deep spring greens pure and bright as fresh paint from an artist’s palette. In all the drive they did not speak and nor did they speak as they climbed the fine bowled marble steps, though Black hadn’t brought his umbrella, necessitating they walk close together under Remus’s. Waiting for them at the top of the stairs was Oliver Saunders, 10th Viscount Cobham, who had rung the station that morning. 

They were invited inside and offered tea and coffee. The inside of the house had once been quite fine but there were cobwebs and dust in corners and some of the gilded things in the foyer had been covered with canvas dropcloths. The sweeping staircase to the second floor was dark and the marble dull and chipped in places. A few tiles were broken or missing altogether from the elaborate Mediterranean tableau inlaid in the entryway. 

The Viscount Cobham ushered them through into the parlor room. He was young; perhaps he was thirty-five. There would have to be some good reason why he was not at war. He was handsome and smartly dressed but not very tall and his pale mustache grew very thinly. And there was a little cigarette ash resting like an insect or a brooch on the lapel of his navy blue smoking jacket. He regarded Remus and Black with the saccharine and pastoral delight most peers seemed to take in engaging with common folk. “It’s a pleasure to see you again, Detective,” he said, taking Black’s hand. Remus watched them clasp so firmly it might’ve hurt. 

“Likewise,” Black said coldly. “And this is Special Investigator Lupin from Scotland Yard.” 

Remus shook Saunders’ hand. It was quite soft and the gentle brown eyes were very bright. Somewhere in the touch Remus thought he felt a spark of the deep well of familiarity one felt when one shook hands with another magic-possessing person. And yet the Saunderses were Muggles, according to Potter, and Black was closely watching. “A pleasure,” said Saunders. Is everything a pleasure with you people, Remus wondered. 

“You called this morning about a disturbance last night,” Remus said. 

“Yes, lights and noise from the woods. I thought it was you all and was going to ask if a noise curfew might be at all possible, you see, my mother… but this morning I went out there and saw the whole site had been dismantled.” 

“Please except our humblest apologies,” Remus told him. Black made a sound through his nose. “The disturbance is — unacceptable. And likely as frustrating for us as for you.” 

“I’m sure,” said Saunders, “I’m sure it is…” 

They had gone out to the site with Potter before he had sent Remus and Black to continue on to parlay with the Viscounts of Hagley Hall. The site had been dismantled to an extent that any spell history and terramancy gathered would be skewed and untrustworthy and certainly inadmissible in the Wizengamot. 

Saunders asked if there was anything else he could do for them and offered them tea and coffee again. Then he shook each of their hands once more and escorted them out again into the rain. They had agreed to meet Potter back at the precinct. “Are you certain they’re Muggles,” Remus asked Black once they’d shut the car doors and started off down the long gravel driveway toward the road. 

“Yes — the Ministry updates our local registry monthly. They’re not on it.” 

“Could you feel though — in the handshake — ” 

“No,” Black said sharply. “He likes you more than me. He throttled my hand, that’s all I felt.” 

“It’s a shame there’s no science to sensory recognition,” Remus said. This was in fact one of his favorite theoretical topics which he frequently debated over drinks with Ministry friends, and which had even been a frequent topic of conversation among the wizarding regiment with which he had been stationed in Pianosa. However, it seemed Black had no interest in it whatsoever. He was watching through the foggy windshield with an expression of cold consternation. 

There was a black mood back at the precinct. Like a chill fog it had permeated through the bullpen from Potter and Black’s office. Fortunately it didn’t stop one of the Muggles from meeting Remus at the door when he and Black came back in, soaked from the downpour, with a copy of the sketch of the position in which the victim’s hand bones had been found. In the hubbub Remus had forgotten he had asked for this. They retired to the office and shut the door. Potter was already winnowing through another case’s files and Remus felt a twinge of surprising anger at his evident willingness to immediately move on. “How was the Viscount,” he asked, not looking up. 

Black sat heavily behind his own desk. The only other chair in the room was an upended milk crate against the wall by the door, which Remus sat on. The spark of anger was combusting by the minute. If they had done what Remus suggested and looked through the spell history and terramancy notes immediately after collecting them they would be facing precisely none of their current problems. He tried to engross himself in studying the sketch of the hand bones, struggling to remember the names of each tiny, shattered spherical piece — distal phalange, middle phalange, proximal phalange, metacarpals… They had been scattered in a rough pattern and a few were broken. 

“Lupin says they’re magic,” said Black lightly, breaking Remus’s concentration. “The Saunderses.” 

“Well they’re not,” Potter said, “they’re not on the — ”

“ — the report from the Ministry. I know. He told me. It was a feeling is all.” 

“Well, a feeling is often relevant,” said Potter diplomatically. “I often say, it’s a shame there’s no science in how wizards identify each other…” 

“Except there is,” Black responded. “It’s monopolized by the Ministry. The spell process is highly classified. There was a case in America of a wizard who reverse-engineered it, and he was sent to the American equivalent of Azkaban for life.” 

“Carlsbad,” Remus said. “The American equivalent of Azkaban. It’s in Carlsbad, New Mexico. It’s carven underground into the salt flats.” 

“Sounds hellish.” 

“Yes — the heat…” 

“Spell classification laws are different in the U.K.,” Potter said. Remus sensed this had become a game of intellectual one-upmanship and tried to engage himself in the bones again. “It was taken into account in _Ministry of Magic v. Cassady_ that one may reverse-engineer a classified spell process completely by accident.” 

“Well this bloke in America, he wasn’t doing it by accident.” 

Remus had always thought the carpal bones in the wrist were the hard ones. _trapezium, trapezoid, scaphoid… hamate, capitate, pisiform…_

“It was very much on purpose,” Black went on, “because if the American Magical Congress is entirely responsible for who is registered as a possessor of magical ability they could ostensibly edit those rolls in accordance with the political climate. Eg. they might strike certain individuals based on race or blood status. Which they’ve done before, during the Plains Purges, when they struck every individual of part-human status from the rolls.” 

Remus scrubbed his hand over his face and tried to remember the names of the final two wrist bones. He decided the cleanness of the separation of hand and wrist from the ulna and radius bones suggested magical means. 

“But, you can understand why they might do that, right?” Potter countered. “It was wartime. After the Battle of Stull — ” 

The last two bones of the wrist were distinctly shaped, Remus remembered. One was vaguely triangular and its name suggested that somehow. The other was deeply concave and a few other bones sat inside it. Yet neither of the remaining bones of the victim’s hand had the telltale concavity. 

“It’s an evil precedent,” said Black, rummaging through his papers for cigarettes. “They did it to justify kidnapping children.” 

“For a decent wizarding education.” 

“It was hardly decent at all,” Black said. “You’ve got to read the literature.” 

“We did, in school.” 

“I know for a fact that you paid positively no attention to any lecture we ever had in History of Magic and besides those textbooks were ancient and little better than propaganda…” 

He looked over all the bones again. None of them were so concave. He wondered if it was the positioning of the tiny chips, like marbles, in the thick and rich black soil. He tried to recall what the x-ray of his own hands had looked like when they had done them after the crash. He couldn’t unbend his hands from fists where they had been throttling on the machinery in the last of it. It had just been stress, the doctors had said; there were no fractures. The nurse had been sweet and rather pretty and possibly just to make him feel better, though this didn’t really make him feel all that much better, she had shown him something on the x-ray he hadn’t known — 

He stood up. Potter and Black stopped talking and looked at him as though they had forgotten he was there. “Is there a sketch of her shin,” he said. His own voice was too loud and perhaps a little hysterical. 

“I can get one,” said Potter, getting up. “What is it?” 

“We’ll see. Will you just get it?” 

Potter went out into the bullpen, shutting the door behind him. Remus went over to Black’s desk and spread out the sketch of the hand bones. “Have you spoken to the coroner today?” 

“No — why would I — ”

“Go get him on the phone and make sure the bones haven’t been disturbed. And then put him on the line with me.” 

Black went out into the bullpen at the same time Potter came back in with the sketch of the shin. This too he laid out beside the sketch of the hand bones on Black’s desk, dislodging a few old folders which fell to the floor and scattered papers everywhere. “She’d broken it badly at one time,” Potter said. “See?” 

‘Badly’ seemed a sort of friendly understatement. It looked as though her leg had gotten stuck in a steel trap. It had healed, but never fully. “She walked with a limp, certainly,” Potter said. “We should probably put that on the APB…” 

“Not yet. Black’s getting the coroner on the phone.” 

He came back in the door presently. The cord would only reach just inside the room. “The bones are alright, Dr. Jones says. What did you want to ask him?” 

Remus took the receiver while Black and Potter shut the door for privacy. Dr. Jones told him that, as suspected, the hand that had been detached and buried was missing the lunate bone. He was also mystified by the existence of an extra bone in both the victim’s wrists. As for her shin it had been completely shattered at one time perhaps ten years previously. It was certain that she walked with a limp. He suggested a bad fall, or that her leg had been caught in something. “Right,” said Remus, “thank you, doctor.” 

He hung up and Black went out to return the phone. When he came back in again they shut the door and hovered over the sketches of the bones on Black’s desk. “What was that all about,” Potter said. 

“Are there werewolves around here?” 

“What? I don’t — ”

“So you wouldn’t’ve canvassed them.” 

“No, of course not.” 

“Why of course not?” Black and Potter looked amongst themselves embarrassedly because they couldn’t answer. “Well,” Remus told them, “she was one.” 

“What?” 

“Really?” 

“There’s an extra bone in the wrist because the animal’s foot moves so differently.” 

“What about her shin?” 

“It was shattered when she was bitten. An adult werewolf’s teeth — ” He found, frustratingly, that it was very difficult to go on. “Well. They can break through bone. Glass. Like butter. They can warp metal.” 

“Don’t werewolves have magical healing abilities?” 

Remus nearly laughed at the absurdity of this statement and wondered how much he could say that wasn’t damning. He himself was lucky to only have a few visible scars which could just as easily be chalked up to war wounds. “The healing itself is moderately faster,” he said. “The scarring is worse, because the wounds are cursed.” 

Potter thought aloud. “Why bury the shin by itself then?” 

“There must be some ritualistic significance to the transference wound,” said Black, back to his one-upmanship. 

“And the hand?” 

“There’s a bone missing from the wrist,” Remus told them. “It’s one of the inner carpals so it seems the perpetrator would’ve detached the hand to remove it. Perhaps it’s significant that the missing bone is called the lunate, because it’s shaped like a crescent moon.” 

“Perhaps it has some other ritual purpose,” Black said. “A werewolf’s left lunate bone…” 

_You think_ , Remus didn’t say. 

“You two should go and do the research. Where’s the nearest wizarding library?” 

“Nearest good one is Manchester — the Birmingham one’s a little provincial…” 

“Start with the classic Dark texts,” Remus said, fetching his damp coat from the rack. His knee twinged at the speed of movement. “ _Saturn’s Syllabary_ and the Croydon Hexonomy… then the New Age revivalism, Lenoir’s _Purist Stratagem_ , Robards’ _A New Dark Vocabulary_ , et cetera.” The coat was clammy and it gave him chills to put on. “You should probably copy down any spells and ritual processes involving werewolf bones because it could be an adaptation,” he told Black and Potter. 

“What are you going to do?” said Black, folding his arms over his chest. For all his seeming appreciation of history and facts it was apparent he did not necessarily take kindly to being assigned to do research. 

“Trust me,” Remus said. He came over to the desk and rolled up the sketches of the hand bone and the shin. “You would rather go to the library.” 

\--

The werewolf registry had moved to Brixton at the beginning of the war, ostensibly so that the cramped offices and examining rooms at the Ministry where Remus had been brought as a wounded child for assorted humiliating and confounding examinations might be used for some more patriotic purpose. The department was now housed in an old dentist’s office which had been heavily warded against Muggle incursion. At a desk just inside the door Remus checked his wand with a security guard. Behind the desk in the antechamber beyond which were examination suites and supervised transformation cells the same old receptionist was picking under her nails with a pencil. “You’re early,” she said, looking at Remus over the rims of her glasses. She glanced at her moonwatch. “Five days early.” 

“I’m not here for that.” 

He had explained to her many times that he was a special investigator with the national MLE, but she never seemed to remember. As was typical she looked him over with utter consternation. “Then whatever can I do for you?” 

Remus flashed her his badge from the front pocket of his coat. He didn’t like doing this. She looked shocked and more than a little suspicious, as though he might’ve stolen it. “I need a registry for the entire West Midlands.” 

“Whyever would you need that?” 

“One of them’s dead.” 

The receptionist looked down at her papers as though there would be an instruction sheet for tackling queries of this magnitude. 

“I’ve been assigned to work the case with the Birmingham police — ”

“So is that why they have a werewolf detective,” the receptionist thought aloud. “To do the werewolf cases.” 

“Well I work other sorts of — ”

“I’ll have to get the supervisor,” she said too loudly. “Take a seat.” 

She disappeared into the back rooms without further ado. Remus desperately didn’t want to sit down but eventually he had to because his knee hurt. Though they had moved the offices of the registry they evidently had not replaced the chairs, which were just as stiff and uncomfortable as they had been when Remus had come for the first time when he was five years old, and when he came of age at seventeen, and when he came back from the war and was obliged to report to them about changes in his status eg. the appearance and behavior of the creature which had been altered by the crash as his own appearance and behavior had of course been. The rooms were very cold and the doctors — they weren’t, he learned later, really doctors; they wore white coats, but technically they were magical biologists — did their utmost to refrain from touching one’s bare skin. Overwhelmingly they were students without the grades to find apprentice work at the reputable magical zoos and laboratories. 

The receptionist came back after a few minutes which felt, as was customary in this place, in these chairs, like an eternity. She ushered Remus back with her into a dingy and minuscule office void of windows or sentimentality. Behind a desk stacked high with papers was the Manager of the Werewolf Registry, Benton Quigley Jr. He glanced up at Remus and then looked back down to his work again. “I can’t spare the staff for an observed transformation on Tuesday,” he said. “What’s wrong now?” 

“I don’t need — nothing’s wrong. I’m here about something else. I thought maybe the receptionist mentioned — ” 

Quigley removed his pince-nez in an extremely put-upon manner. It was evident the receptionist hadn’t mentioned anything. 

“I need a list of every werewolf in the West Midlands,” Remus told him. 

Quigley fixed him with an expression that suggested this request was literally insane until Remus, hating it, flashed his MLE badge again. At which point Quigley said, “ _Every_ one?” 

“Yes — active and inactive, and deceased, going back twenty years, please.” 

He had been thinking from the hideous chairs that everything about it was too practiced. There was quite simply no way it hadn’t happened before. 

“What do you plan to do with _that_?” 

“Ascertain the identity of a skeleton.” 

“A skeleton?” 

“Yes. Found in Worcestershire.” 

Quigley grumbled. He shifted a few papers. It smelled terrible in this room — in this building. Like Muggle disinfectant — like any number of evil hospitals. Still, featureless beige rooms to die in. Scrubbed of death from floor to ceiling tiles each and every night and yet death stubbornly remained. 

“The lists were last updated in December,” Quigley said, unearthing a few folders from the unseen bowels of the desk. “Difficult to keep track what with the war. Our registrar is in Tripoli last I heard…” 

He felt almost alarmingly impatient and he itched. And his knee hurt. He reminded himself it was just the room and the memory of the other self surfacing beneath his skin. Whichever echo of the creature which shared his lungs and heart recalling this was the place it spent throwing itself against the wall all day and night every four weeks. Just the rattling mouth-breathing bullshit of these fucking people who thought of themselves as the put-upon chaperones for a bunch of muzzled rabid dogs. Quigley was copying the contents of the folders with magic seemingly as slowly as was possible. He wore a wedding ring he evidently hadn’t taken off in decades because it was a great deal narrower than his sausagelike finger. Eventually he passed a thick stack of copies up to Remus, who had turned on his heel (his knee did something bad) and was halfway out the door before the man behind the desk took off his pince-nez and said, “See you on Tuesday.” 

\--

Back in Hagley it was raining. He knew he should go to the station and try and get anything done while Black and Potter were at the library in Manchester but instead he went to the pub and sat in the back corner and went through the copies from the registry. 

He understood this list was by no means complete. A study had been published in some fairly reputable journal a few years previous which had concluded that only 20% of werewolves turned over the age of 16 were registered. It had caused general public outcry about radicalized cells who might do anything, including ally with the Nazis, to undermine the British wizarding establishment. 

The bartender brought him over a new cider every hour or so, which was always vaguely startling because Remus didn’t quite remember drinking it. Eventually he found there were no werewolves registered in the town of Hagley. In Birmingham there were quite a few, mostly men, older, scattered about the city. Many of the listings were accompanied by descriptions that hinted to Remus they were veterans of the First World War. He looked for women around thirty-five and compared their addresses. Eventually he found he was bouncing his heel wildly under the table. 

_Clara Montclair — DOB 21 June 1911 — Date of Bite 4 December 1924 — Six Ashes Road, Bobbington_

_Mary Ann Brown — DOB 5 February 1913 — Date of Bite 21 October 1918 — Six Ashes Road, Bobbington — LAPSED FEB 1940_

_Helen Robinson — DOB 16 October 1909 — Date of Bite 17 March 1921 — Pear Tree Lane, Heathton_

_Margaret Jessup — DOB 19 January 1911 — Date of Bite 12 June 1917 — Brantley Lane, Bulwardine_

_Ruth Gosford — DOB 9 July 1912 — Date of Bite 25 November 1920 — Pear Tree Lane, Heathton — LAPSED SEPT 1938_

_Frances Rubinstein — DOB 20 September 1910 — Date of Bite 4 August 1915 — Brantley Lane, Bulwardine_

_Wilhelmina Doherty — DOB 22 April 1908— Date of Bite 27 October 1911 — Six Ashes Road, Bobbington — LAPSED AUG 1941_

_Opal MacAuliffe - DOB 11 May 1912 — Date of Bite N/A, BORN A WEREWOLF — Pear Tree Lane, Heathton_

_Rosemary Cox — DOB 1 November 1910 — Date of Bite 12 May 1917 — Brantley Lane, Bulwardine_

According to a map of the vicinity Remus borrowed from the bartender when he came over with an nth cider all nine women lived or had lived close to one another in the farmlands to the north between Hagley and Wolverhampton. There were just under two-hundred other registered female werewolves in the West Midlands entire, and a few seemed to live in close clusters, but they were mostly older, and none showed such a frequency of lapsed registrants. In peacetime a representative from the werewolf registry would have visited the listed residence, with armed MLE in tow, if any of these women had missed their yearly check-in appointment. A thin staff meant they were simply marked as lapsed. Perhaps they had simply moved, though it was more likely that they were dead. 

He went through the registry again with an eye for women in their twenties and forties and compared these names and addresses too. There was a group of women — hardly more than girls — living on Grange Lane in Alvechurch, and another not much older in a place called Rous Lench. The older women lived west of Kidderminster in Shelsley Walsh and Bitterley. One or two among each younger group was marked as lapsed, and a few in each collective of older women had been confirmed deceased. 

Evidently it had been a very long time because the next time the bartender came over it was very dark outside and he didn’t have a cider with him. “Closing up shop,” he said. “You’ll want to head upstairs.” 

Remus, in fact, didn’t want to. He thanked the bartender and went out into the rain-washed midnight streets back to the precinct, which was empty. He copied down the collectives’ addresses and the members’ names and magnified them with magic and tacked them up against the wall. Then he copied the local map the bartender had given him and blew that up with magic too and pinpointed the locations in which every woman werewolf under age 50 lived or had lived in the region since 1920. He realized maybe he should start thinking about going to sleep but this seemed foolish. After all, now he had only four days to solve the case before the full moon. 

Eventually he went into the bullpen to see if any of the women had Muggle criminal records. He was in process of this when Black and Potter came bursting through the front door. Behind them there was just a wedge of sun at the end of the dark street. 

“Hullo,” Remus said. His voice didn’t really work and he didn’t remember the last time he had eaten. Criminal records were strewn about him on the floor and he had undone his shirtcollar under the pressure of this strange fever into which time had dissolved like a sugar cube in hot tea. “How’d it go?” 

They didn’t answer. Potter helped Remus up with a hand clasping his wrist. The bad knee did a very bad thing and he was obliged to hobble behind them into the office, bracing himself against the Muggles’ desks with the relevant criminal records tucked under his arm. 

“You’ve been busy,” Black said. If it was possible his eyes were moving even more quickly than usual. 

“Yes. It's from the werewolf registry. All the werewolf women who live locally.” 

“What does _lapsed_ mean?” 

“Probably dead.” 

It hurt terribly to stand. Eventually he sat in Potter’s chair and stretched his leg out under the table. Black was watching him illegibly. In Manchester the two detectives had copied a number of spell processes involving werewolf bones from texts that were so Dark the half-blood librarian had refused to touch them. Most of them, Potter explained, had been adapted from a spell that dated to the third century. It was essentially a form of divination that would later inform the feudal Scottish Taghairm and select processes of osteomancy that were still used in the present day. In short it was a methodology for communicating with the dead. 

The particular adaptation that called for a werewolf’s left lunate bone had been composed by a student of Ghislain Lenoir circa the publication of _Purist Stratagem_ in 1826. The bone was but one of many items necessary to create what the composer called a rosary. The process of accrual of these items imbued the rosary with power. When one wore the rosary around one’s neck one could host the presence of a desired deceased person as a kind of ghost inside one’s own body. 

\--

At noontime Remus went with Black to Bobbington. He had gone upstairs to the room above the Six Arms and laid down with intent just to stretch his leg out but had fallen asleep and stayed asleep til eleven-thirty, when Black came and knocked on the door. As was usual, it was raining, and conversation in the car was stilted. “What’s the werewolf registry like,” Black said. 

“Dismal.” 

He watched the rain scar the window. The low fog like a rolling smoke or gas in the fields. Black turned the car onto Six Ashes Road and the tires skidded against the wet asphalt. 

“What house are we looking for?” 

“Dunno the number. It’ll have a magical marker outside.” 

“A what?” 

“A magical marker so everyone knows — ”

It was on the doorframe of his apartment in Shoreditch, right where the Jewish family down the hall had a mezuzah. 

“That’s allowed?” 

“Yes.” Almost anything is allowed, Remus did not say, short of murder. And, well, who knows about murder. 

“What’s it look like?” 

“It’s just a little thing. Glowing — there it is.” 

The pale moody light was hovering like a hinkypunk at the corner of a property in utter disrepair. Behind an overgrown hedge was a brick house which had evidently once been fine. Ivy was grown over it in a way that might’ve been lovely if it were at all maintained. The mailbox was stuffed with junk and a board was pressed against one of the front windows where a stone had broken it. The sole marker of livingness about the place was a gutted boxspring mattress which had been shoved up against the stone wall so that creeper vines might cling to it on their route toward the sun. All in all it was one of the nicer werewolf collective residences Remus had seen in his experience. 

They got out of the car. Movement in the upper windows. “ _Women_ live here?” said Black, mystified. Remus ignored him. 

There were death-sounding birds in the fields around gleaning kernels from the struggling spring growth. They weren’t even halfway to the door before it opened. The woman who slipped out closed it behind her, clutching the doorknob behind her back; her locking spell was so strong Remus could feel the shock of her magic diffuse through the air like forthcoming lightning. She was extremely tall and her hair was braided messily over her shoulder. In her blue and brown housedress the visible swath of her neck and collarbone was a mass of raised, tearing scar tissue. “Who sent you,” she said. Something even about this human form suggested raised hackles: she was prepared for a fight. 

“I’m Detective Sirius Black of the Worcestershire Constabulary,” said Black, advancing like a fencer with his badge in hand. “This is Special Investigator Lupin with the National Department of Magical Law Enforcement. Who are you?” 

This was not the question she was expecting. “Why?” 

“We have reason to believe your life is in danger — ” 

“It’s certainly taken you long enough.” 

Together they went inside, where there was a fire in the woodstove. Two more women were in the kitchen playing canasta at a wobbly table and on the gas stove a teakettle was on the verge of boiling. 

“Would you gentlemen like anything,” said the woman from the door. “Mostly just tea. Or I got stale biscuits.” 

“No thank you,” said Remus, at the same time that Black said, “I’d love tea and biscuits.” 

The kettle boiled. The canasta players gathered the cards and one of them put the bundle into the front pocket of her apron. Remus was about to ask for their names when one of the players said, “So which one are you here about then?” 

“Which one of what?” 

“Well they’re probably here about Opal,” said the one from the door, pouring the hot water out into four chipped ceramic mugs. “She was just a few months ago.” 

“She’s gone and moved in with that man,” said the other canasta player acidly. 

“You don’t really believe that shite, do you, Peg?” 

“We’re not,” Remus tried, “not sure what her name is. We found — just bones.” 

He had thought perhaps they might react emotionally but they did not. The woman from the door pressed the most chipped mug into Black’s open hand. “We don’t actually have biscuits after all,” she said. 

“How long ago?” said one of the canasta players. 

“Just on Wednesday — ”

“No, I mean how long ago did she die.” 

“Eighteen months, according to the coroner.” 

“Might be Willie,” said the other player. “Maybe Bella.” 

“What were their full names?” Black asked. 

“Wilhelmina Doherty,” said the woman from the door. She watched with bemusement, leaning up against the sink, as Black wrote the names down quickly in his little notebook. “And Lubella Jones.” 

“Had either of them had a child?” 

“Certainly not Willie.” 

“She preferred the company of women.” 

“What about Bella?” 

“Maybe? I mean, she was bit when she was 25.” 

“In the shin?” 

All three women looked at Remus, knowing he knew the answer. Probably knowing something else too. 

“Any idea where she was from,” Black asked. 

Their faces turned moonlike toward him. “Sheffield,” said one of the canasta players. “That’s where she got bit.” 

“Can you think of any, any other friends she might’ve — ” 

“Listen,” said the woman from the door. “We don’t leave the house alone anymore. None of us do. She didn’t have any other friends.” She stood up, folding her arms over her chest. “Is there anything else.” 

“What time,” Remus asked, “in the lunar calendar, do they happen?” 

“The week before the full moon.” Her smile was brutally sharp. “So now’s the time.” 

She escorted them to the door. Remus could hear nervous footsteps upstairs. Black half-jogged out toward the car like a caged animal set free but the woman grasped Remus’s arm tightly between elbow and shoulder with a grip like a vise before he could get too far. “The boys go missing too,” she whispered. “Young ones. Like you.” 

None of it surprised him to hear but dread still started spooling in his gut like stale drink. “From where?” 

“Cutnall Green. None of them are registered.” She looked toward Black, who was watching them quizzically from the car. “You ought to go alone.” 

It was raining. She stood on the threshold until Black had pulled the car around in the driveway and turned back into Six Ashes Road. Then she disappeared back into the house again. Remus rested his forehead against the cool glass of the car window. “What did she want to tell you,” Black said. 

For a horrifying moment he contemplated telling the truth. “Nothing,” he said eventually. 

\--

Back at the precinct he spoke on the phone with a police officer named Dearborn in Sheffield. Lubella Jones, nee Taylor, had been reported missing by her husband Roger Jones in October 1930. She’d gone to a neighbor’s to borrow a cup of sugar and had never come back. Dearborn rather pedantically explained to Remus all the reasons why it was rare any officers at the Sheffield constabulary, be they Muggle or magic, investigated the disappearances of young women, especially new mothers. Nevermind Lubella’s son had been five years old, according to the documentation, at the time of his mother’s disappearance, and a happy child, successful in school, despite the family’s poverty; her husband was a Squib and worked in an ironworks. He had provided a photograph of Lubella to speed the investigation but this had apparently been lost. 

By the time Remus hung up he felt possessed by a tired rage. It was altogether abundantly obvious that Bella had been attacked en route to the neighbor’s and had refused to go home for fear of hurting her husband and child. Likely it had been the most difficult decision of her life and likely it wounded her each and every day. The metaphysical twin of the limp. She had never seen a doctor — if she had, she would’ve been registered — and she had dragged herself alone across the countryside with a shattered leg. She had dragged herself all the way to Worcestershire and then to death. 

He wondered almost helplessly who had bitten her. After all it had happened to him almost exactly five years earlier in Colchester when he had taken the kitchen scraps out to compost in the garden. The moon was luminous but bleary in the cold like a painting… 

It was only because he was so exhausted that he was thinking about it at all. Usually it lived where about nine thousand other things did in a black box at the back of his brain marked with a skull and crossbones. He went back into Black and Potter’s office and shut the door. They were hovering over Black’s desk trying to decipher the rest of the materials in the rosary and ascertain where they might be found. Potter had gone to Rous Lench and talked to the werewolf girls who lived in a half-collapsed cottage there and found there was one among them — Catherine Claverack, twenty-two years old, unregistered — who had not come home from a trip to the grocery two days previous. 

“You only need one bone for each rosary,” Potter explained. “So with the sheer number who have disappeared it stands to reason someone is just making multiple rosaries. Like some cottage industry.” 

“Some _one_?” 

“Perhaps a collective.” 

Remus had a thought. “Which of you has the purest blood?” 

They looked amongst each other nervously. “Why?” Black said. 

“One of you ought to go to Knockturn Alley. If there’s some sort of trade in these items it’d be there.” 

“Can’t they send someone else from the National MLE?” 

“Quite simply the Ministry will pull me off this case if they know it has to do with werewolves.” 

This was true and would be true even if he were not one. It was also likely that he would be pulled from the case if they knew he was after Dark artifacts being sold on Knockturn Alley, as those shops were popular stomping grounds for the powerful pure-blood families who predominately funded the Ministry and, thus, the magical war effort. 

“Sirius can’t go,” said Potter. Remus still for the life of him couldn’t believe that was Black’s first name. “He’ll run into half — ”

Black elbowed him, he thought surreptitiously. Their silence was cold and evidently well-trod. Out in the bullpen one of the Muggles laughed uproariously. It was decided in a few moments that Potter would go to London and trace the sales of ritual divination items in all the most infamous Knockturn Alley curio shops and antique markets. Meanwhile Remus and Black would comb all of the West Midlands for the rare items necessary for the creation of the rosary: a skein of kelpie’s hair, blue fritillary bulbs, the desiccated heart valves of a a yeti or sasquatch, a scrap of the flesh-fabric of a mature lethifold, a slice of hippogriff’s horn, and a full chimera talon. 

This decided, they split up. Potter went back to his bedsit to Apparate to the Leaky and Black went to a magic shop in Halesowen he’d long thought to be suspect. Remus went to Kidderminster to the potions supply store there; the kindly owner, who was in his eighties, gave him a tour of the entire premises, including the basement. At last they went into the back room where the owner made Remus a cup of tea and Remus showed him the list of materials for the rosary, many of which the owner seemed shocked to discover were used for any magical purposes whatsoever. 

He had told Black he would go to the magical district of Worcester as well. Instead he went back to the precinct and filtered through the mess on Potter’s desk until he found the notes on Catherine Claverack. Potter had indicated in a sloppy shorthand that she was blonde-haired and had been bitten at age three. The girls she lived with had said she spoke with a West Country accent but they weren’t sure of its exact source. One had said Torquay and another had said Newquay, which gave Remus enough information to lock himself in the phone booth in the hallway again and call the magical units of each town’s constabulary. 

Eventually he went back to the room above the pub to await the documents which the Newquay police department told him they were sending by owl. Outside it was beginning to get dark and it smelled like rain. He fell asleep in all his clothes with the window wide open and woke up in twenty minutes when the bird landed, waterlogged, on the windowsill. The rain had come in onto the floor spattering dark and thick as blood against the hardwoods and the moth-eaten Persian carpet. The owl refused to leave his room in the downpour so he dried it off with magic and gave it a few of the stale tea biscuits the owner of the potions supply warehouse had slipped into his pockets and then he went down into the pub with the documents. Black was there, reading the paper. “We took Longstop Hill,” he said when Remus sat down. 

“What?” 

“In Tunisia.” 

He didn't know anything about it. Occasionally his division on Pianosa had received missives about the campaign for North Africa or they had overheard the officers speaking quietly about it at night. 

“The Afrika Korps encampment there was the only thing keeping us from Tunis,” Black said, folding the paper. “And the Americans are nearly to Bizerte.” 

The bartender came over and Remus said he would just have a coffee but Black ordered a Guinness. Just after he came back to the table with the drinks the air raid siren went off melodious and distant as thunder. The bartender turned off all the electric lights and the radio and came round to the tables with candles and matches. 

“Do you think we might win,” Black said rather nervously. 

“I would’ve said no until quite recently. And I don’t know if — ” Remus reached across the table and took a sip of Black’s Guinness. “ — if I would say yes. Yet.” 

“There’s a difference, also,” Black said. He was looking past Remus’s head out the front window onto the dark street. The thick golden candlelight cast his face in shadow so dramatic he looked like a shamanistic storyteller at the beginning of the world. He was quiet for so long Remus at first thought he wouldn’t continue at all. Instead, eventually, he said, “There’s a difference between getting out of it intact and winning.” 

He wasn’t sure how to respond. He’d had Black pegged as overemotional since day one but had presumed that, like a great deal of other veterans, he would go to literally any lengths whatsoever not to talk about it. That or it was a function of the head wound. Perhaps he didn’t remember much. “By that logic,” Remus told him finally, “I don’t think we will win.” 

Evidently Black had forgotten about this line of conversation already. Otherwise he had been using it as a sort of wedge into a more interrogative conversation. “Where were you,” he asked. “After the beach.” 

“Pianosa. It’s a tiny island in the Tuscan Archipelago.” 

“Doing what?” 

“Flying.” 

“You flew — ”

“Yes. A Spitfire. Made right here in Birmingham.” 

“Then what?” 

“Then what do you think?” 

Black didn’t say anything. 

“It crashed in Italy,” Remus told him. “I walked. Well I was pretty banged up. Looking for a place to Apparate. But where were you before the beach?” 

“I’m sure James told you,” said Black. He looked away bitterly. With his head turned like this he looked more like a half-insane aristocrat painted by one of the Dutch Masters. “Our unit marched into Belgium along the River Dyle. The plan was to halt the German invasion along the river. We knew that they were coming from the north through the Netherlands but then they got in south of us at Houx. So we had to pull back to the French border to fight them on the right flank. They were pushing us to the beach. Our regiment got split up and we, I mean James and me and a couple others, we ended up in this town called Vinkt. Have you heard of it?” 

“Like the French for twenty?” 

“No, with a K. The Belgians were fighting the invasion along the Lys basically just to allow the BEF to retreat. Everybody knew at that point that it was lost. When we got there the Wehrmacht were taking civilians hostage into the churches. Then they threw hand grenades inside.” 

So help him Remus had figured it was something like this. Some horrible witnessing. “You watched it?” 

“We were hiding in this garrett room. Across the street. The window — shook. We left in the middle of the night and swam across the river. The next day we learned the Belgians had surrendered. And the day after that I got hit. After that I can’t remember. James got us to the beach.” 

The air raid siren sounded the all-clear and the bartender put the lights back on and the radio. Black leant back against the maroon leather banquette. He had finished the Guinness without Remus noticing. 

“So that’s why I don’t think we could ever win,” he said. “You can’t close the box again so what good is winning.” 

Remus didn’t know what to say and after a while sitting in silence he excused himself to bed. In his room he let the Newquay owl back out into the clear evening and then he sat at the window in the wet night breeze and had a cigarette. He realized it was nearly May and the end of May would mark precisely three years since Dunkirk. He thought about Catherine and then about Lubella and he realized altogether much too late what he should’ve told Black, which was that for some the box had never been closed, and in fact it was unclear if there had ever been a box at all, because for some the depth and breadth of human evil had always been rather obvious. 

\--

He woke at three AM from the customary dream about being trapped in a black box which was burning. When his heart slowed down he put on the gaslight beside the bed and found the papers the magical detectives had sent from Newquay. Catherine had been expelled from Hogwarts at age 13 for reasons undisclosed. At age fifteen she had been caught shoplifting and the Muggle police had taken her photograph. She had a mess of wild straw hair and her eyes were very tired. A few months later she hadn’t shown up to a meeting with a probation officer and her parents had said she’d run away. 

At five in the morning he went to the precinct intending to get some paperwork done at Potter’s desk but Black was already there looking hungover and embarrassed. “There’s coffee on,” he said. 

Remus sat down. “I didn’t ask last night if you found anything yesterday.” 

Black looked up. “Right,” he said. “They had hippogriff horn at Wychbury Apothecary. They sell it over the counter powdered, not sliced. I asked if he ever did special orders.” 

“Does he?” 

“He leaves it on the back stoop every few months. Comes back in the morning and there’s a hundred galleons waiting for him.” 

“How do they coordinate — ”

“Owl. Different bird every time he said. Besides you know — ”

“It’s not admissible as evidence, yes. Did you ask him about the other ones?” 

“None of the rest of them have any purpose beyond the Dark. The apothecary said there are a specialized subset of dealers… For example it’s very likely the culprit Owl-orders the valves from Seattle or Nepal, depending on which species he’s using… there are only a very few, um, _traders,_ who dare to have anything to do with this sort of material.” 

“What about the bulbs? Those seemed pretty innocent…” 

“The rarest wildflower in the United Kingdom,” Black said. “Nearly impossible to cultivate.” 

“What do they look like?” 

Black had found a picture in a Muggle botany book, which was one of many large tomes open on his desk. He held it up to show Remus. “Little silly blue things.” 

In desperation Remus wrote a letter to a colleague in the Department for the Control of Dark Materials. He had slept with Fenwick a few times, regrettably, especially because Fenwick was married and had taken to sending Remus depressing drunken poetry. But, this meant that Fenwick likely wouldn’t pass any details of the case on to Remus’s boss, a sycophantic asshole named Robert Lansing, or anyone else in the MLE, particularly if the letter contained some florid bullshit. 

_Benj I am on a nightmare of a case and wonder if you can help me. Have you any record of sellers who deal in lethifold, yeti, sasquatch, kelpie, and/or chimera materials? We are in Worcestershire yet I doubt the salespeople are nearby. I’ll take any & all information you’ve got. I’d appreciate your best discretion of course. It’s been a while since we’ve seen each other. Things have been rather busy since leaving the hospital. I’ll let you know when I’m back in London and we can catch up. _

He closed the letter with _Thinking of you_ , which was a lie. He sent the roll of parchment off to London with Black’s owl. Then he read absently through the copies Black and Potter had made of the instructions for creating the rosary. There were no instructions for the method of acquiring the hippogriff horn and chimera talon, and the lethifold fabric had to be acquired by banishing the creature and cutting a swath with silver scissors, which was likely standard methodology. The yeti or sasquatch had to be specially dissected less than an hour after slaughter, also with silver, and the rest of the corpse was to be unused and burned. There were even special instructions for disposal of the ashes. The kelpie’s hair, which was then braided to create the strands of the rosary, had to be cut from a living kelpie in human form, with a silver knife, by the weaver him or herself. 

“Are there kelpies around here,” he asked Black. 

He didn’t look up from his reading. “Most of them from this area were trucked to Snowdonia in the nineteenth century.” 

“How many would you say live there?” 

“I don't know.” Black talked about this, as everything, like someone who had never needed nor wanted think about any experience but his own for more than fifteen seconds. Remus seethed. “Maybe a couple hundred.” 

\--

It took him four hours to drive to the park in Potter’s car. He listened to the BBC radio, which broadcast news from the war. They were talking about the army’s move forward on Longstop Hill. It seemed in another few days the Reich’s hold on Tunis would fall. He had taken lunch with him from the Six Arms and Black’s tent and, upon advisory, one half of a two-way mirror, in case “leads” demanded his speedy return. While he went to negotiate with the deadly horsewomen of Snowdonia Black would no doubt be meticulously tracking any sign of the silly blue flowers through the West Midlands. After a while mulling this over Remus found he was throttling the steering wheel so aggressively he had rubbed some of the leather off in flakes that stuck to his sweaty palms. 

It was the case that was troubling him. He pulled the car off the road and walked into the woods a bit and tried to scry in a shallow muddy pool of rainwater, which he hadn’t done since Italy. It was inexact and, like much ancient magic, inadmissible in court. But it was the case that was troubling him. The culprit’s valuing his part-human victims for their parts and no doubt participating in a clandestine economy rooted in the sale and barter of these parts of the bodies of humans or humanoid creatures of tantamount intelligence seemed like a rather common system taken to its logical extreme. He could hear the voice of the receptionist at the werewolf registry: _that’s why they have a werewolf detective_ … 

It took him about an hour to clear his head enough to scry, by which time it was dark. When he came out of it his knee would hardly let him stand and he had to wait for a while sitting in the leaf loam and twisting out his ankle before he could get to his feet. He’d noted in scrying the largest encampment of kelpies was Westerly still in Llyn Trawsfynydd. He set up the tent and cast a few wards around the vicinity and then he slept. 

\--

He dreamed of Italy. He walked in the brush. There was no pain anymore, so it was rather like it had been toward the end, when he had realized, almost accidentally, that he was dying. He could recall sometimes, especially in the dreams, that had been neither surprising nor frightening. Quite simply he felt nonessential pieces of his brain slowly closing like the remaining shops on Pianosa did daily in the early afternoon for siesta. His leg had stopped hurting. Sometimes he looked at it and wondered how this could possibly be true when it looked like it did. Occasionally he remembered the reason why he was walking was that he was technically in enemy territory and that his plane had been destroyed and that the only way out would be to find enough magic to Apparate. Usually he just walked knowing neither where or why he was walking. The hills were low and beginning to be green and now and then he passed herders’ lean-tos and toppled fences. He kept to the low dells and drank from the cold bright streams and did not sleep or sometimes he fell asleep walking and woke up in a heap among the sun-bleached stones. 

In the dream which was perhaps memory it was a living sort of country which spoke to him in a language he didn’t fully understand. E.g. perhaps it was speaking to him in Italian of which he understood only the necessaries. This language was soft and mellifluous as water and bore no structure for lies. When the dream changed, he was pulling apart a pomegranate with his fingers and the bright sweet blood was running all over his hands and dripping off his elbows. When the dream changed again it went to the place it always did — his parents’ backyard, Colchester, February 1922 — and yet from somewhere that same strange language continued, urgent now, in unintelligible whispers, as though this dream, like the truth of it, didn't always end the same, no matter how hard he tried. 

\--

In the morning he went down to the lake. His leg ached from sleeping on the ground and his clothes were rumpled. He sat there for a while looking out over the water skipping flat stones but no one came. So he went to the pub. “It’s early yet,” said the bartender. 

“Have you breakfast?”

“Beans on toast.” 

He sat in the front window and ate and watched the lake. Thought about the dream. The moon was nearly full and sat in the bright blue sky visible as a sort of sun-leached floating stone through the smudged glass. After a few minutes the bartender came over with coffee. 

“Is it safe to swim in the lake,” Remus asked. 

“No. People drown all the time.”

“Around where do they drown?” 

The bartender looked at Remus and around his eyes as if searching for something that might suggest this information shouldn’t be disclosed. “Around the northwest shore,” he said. “There’s an inlet with woods all around. Used to be a swimming hole when I was a boy. No longer, unfortunately…” 

He put in his voice a suggestion of the practiced magic he had been instructed to use when asking questions of Muggles one might not necessarily want them to remember. “How do I get there?” 

The familiar quasi- _Imperius_ gloss — forgivable, of course, when used by a Ministry employee in the course of an investigation, or by a soldier in a time of war, and yet, somehow, despite much practice, no less guilt-inducing — passed over the bartender’s clear green eyes. “No one lives out there. There’s a gravel road but you’ll have to walk mostly.” 

Remus thanked him. When he left he could feel the bartender watching his back from inside the pub. Already, likely, he had forgotten much of the conversation. He drove south again toward the crossroads at the foot of the lake. The bright day was darkening with coming rain and all around the grass and the hills seemed overwhelmingly green. He felt jittery with the coffee and began attempting to quiz himself on his knowledge of kelpies, which was limited. There had been a few colonies in the Mediterranean and so they had had a kind of training on Pianosa. The trick, or so the instructor had said, was not to let them get you in the water — not even a toe. It seemed this was a difficult trick for heterosexuals to remember because a few members of the squadron drowned anyway. 

Black had had doubts Remus could go to the lake without being seduced and drowned and had suggested they forego this lead altogether in favor of whatever else he thought might provide solutions. Not for the first time Remus wondered how someone so obtuse had ever become a cop. He had lied and told Black he had gotten clearance to use experimental magic that would counteract the effects of suggestion but that was all he could say on the subject. 

He drove northwesterly along the one-lane gravel road. Over the far hills the rain was dragging the clouds down into the countryside in a wash of impressionist pink color like something out of one of the paintings by Turner in the National Gallery. The surface of the lake refracted a blackish silver like the burnished shine in a neglected antique. For a fleeting moment he thought of Black’s eyes and was summarily horrified. He found himself throttling the steering wheel again so he put the window down and put his elbow out it in attempt to try and relax. Of course it was then the rain started. 

It had always been hard for him to understand what people did in places like this, being as he was from Essex and growing up in town. He was obliged to wait a few minutes for a white-bearded farmer in a black slicker to lead a herd of sheep across the road. They were marked with a red handprint on their sides and the paint was running in the rain and smearing like blood. When they were gone he moved on again. 

He parked the car at the end of the road and Disillusioned it and then he walked up through the fields and over the blustery headland toward the inlet. When he reached a low wood he found there were trails and paths cut through the thick brush nearly as meticulously maintained as they might be on a peer’s property. The widest of these he took down toward the shore. The wind had whipped up whitecaps on the lake’s surface but in the breaths between gusts he could hear the raindrops on the water like tinny bells, or a very fine glass shattering. 

He cast wards and set up the tent and sat in the unzipped doorway watching the lake and the rain. Had a cigarette and poured himself a little whiskey. Eventually he napped, lulled to sleep by the sound of the rain on the canvas. When he woke it was around noon and the rain had cleared. He went outside to piss only to find there was a dead fish on the ground just outside his tent and it was missing its head. A few quick spells told him it had not been interfered with aside from the decapitation so he built a fire and cooked and ate it. Then he went, and, eschewing each and every warning of the consultant from Pianosa, waded into the water up to his ankles. It was unbearably cold especially on the bad leg. He watched the clouds move overhead quickly in the shifting wind. There was a minnow darting around his feet. He crouched and it fled from his spreading shadow to disappear under one of the mossy stones that blanketed the lakebed. Then from behind him a wholly expected voice: “Lovely day for a swim.” 

Standing beside his tent was a young woman. He might not have been able to tell were he not looking for signs. She wore a very plain white shift and her hair was a thick, shiny black cut boyishly short. They regarded each other for a moment in silence. Remus was suddenly conscious of his insecure foothold on the slippery stones. He stood up when the woman came down wading into the water beside him. She was the first woman he’d seen in a long time who didn’t groom her underarms and legs. Her mouth was bright and mobile and something about her teeth was improper. Their sharpness? Squareness? Not long ago she had skinned her knee and the wound was still healing. The wet hem of her dress stuck against her thighs showing her gooseflesh through the thin fabric. 

“You’re very put together,” she said finally. 

“What?” 

“Put together. Usually, you know, it’s a horrible scene. Crying and begging and all that sort.” 

“I’m not — ”

“Death is an entire world of slow-moving water in our mythology,” said the woman. “Though of course much of it has been lost.” 

“The world?” 

“The mythology — but also, yes, the world.” 

“It isn’t just death,” Remus said, “it’s — ”

“Most of the dissection happens after,” she said, as though this was monumentally reassuring. “It’s not your body anymore after.” 

“It isn’t?” 

“No.” She looked out across the water, slowly folding her arms across her chest. “Maybe it’s different for you.” 

“Maybe it is. I wouldn’t know.” 

“We had kingdoms,” she said. “So did you all. Our craft was beyond what you or I could even conceive — but anyway I suppose you’re here to cut someone’s hair.” 

He swallowed. “I’m not — actually. I’m looking for the person who sends them. Or persons.” 

She studied him again. Something — the other thing — was moving in her eyes. “Police?” 

He didn’t say anything. She waded out of the water, walking backward, sure-footed on the stones. She would not take her sight from him again, he understood. 

“Police have come before,” she said. 

“Have they?” 

“Yes.” 

“Who — ” 

“Special police,” she said, “from London.” 

Remus’s blood thrilled horribly. I’m special police from London, he didn’t say. He remembered he had written Fenwick and a cold stone dropped into his belly. Evidently none of them were to be trusted. 

He waded out of the water and followed her on the path along the shore. “He sends them under a light _Imperius_ ,” she explained. “They’re compelled to travel here and find us and cut our hair and return by a specified date. They understand what’s happening to them. He wants them to be afraid.” 

“It’s part of the spell process.” 

“Is it?” 

“Yes.” He found it was very difficult to speak about it. She was studying him with a cold bemusement. “Fear is.” He cleared his throat; he’d thought of something. “Why do you let them cut your hair?” 

“Why do you think.” 

“Threats? Or money?” 

“We tried with one, younger than you. Maybe he was sixteen. He killed himself in front of us with the silver hair-cutting knife. Right through his throat. It turns out that’s part of the _Imperius_ too. And then a few days later a few of us disappeared.” 

“How many is a few?” 

“Sixteen. Out of seventy.” 

“That’s — ”

“Kelpie parts are very lucrative on the black market. That was when the police came from London.” 

The path ended where the headland steepened and dropped a scrape of grey stone into the lake. They would have to wade into the water around it to the other side. Remus gestured for the kelpie to go first but she refused. _Not even a toe,_ he remembered. 

“Why would I drown you,” she said, seeing his hesitation. 

“I don’t — it’s just — ” 

“This isn’t how we do it anyway.” 

“How do you do it?” 

“You wouldn’t be able to tell if I was doing it. That’s the point.” 

He rolled up his pants past the knees. She winced when she saw the bad one. 

“Is that — ”

“No.” 

“Then what is it?” 

“From the war.” 

“They let you in the war?” 

“They let everybody in the war.” 

“Except women.” 

“Well they let women be nurses and things…” 

She rolled her eyes at him. He waded in. This time the chill felt somewhat more bearable. He could feel her walking behind him through the water more than he could hear her; her movement was nearly silent. Around the outcropping the water was cool and smelled like shadows. Beyond it was a rocky beach and an encampment of makeshift shelters. On an ashy cookfire three women were making coffee. At the sight of him one of them whistled a long, low tone and a few more emerged from the shelters slowly and silently as some avenging army. His escort tightened a hand on his shoulder and he could feel the sharpness and coldness of her fingernails through his shirt. 

Sat at the cookfire with a tin mug of coffee and eyes on him from the woods he showed the women the photograph of Catherine Claverack. She had come, they said, two days previous to cut the hair of a ten year old kelpie girl named Emma who refused to come out from her tent. Bella Jones he could only vaguely describe to them but they thought they recalled she had visited them at the encampment on the lake in November 1941, on the morning of the first frost, and that she had cut the hair of the party’s matriarch, a kelpie named Alice, who had died a few days later from an infection sustained from the silver knife. They recalled that neither Catherine nor Bella had seemed afraid. 

\--

He had always been fond of the water. As a child he had gone out frequently with his parents to the Clacton pier and in fact it was there they went as a kind of treat once everything had been finished at St. Mungo’s. His mother smiled and kissed him a lot and his father bought him an expensive fluorescent candy and they walked together holding his hands out to the end of the pier where they watched the water and the clouds moving far out against the sea. He understood even as young as he was that this was a performance for his own benefit that nevertheless was unconvincing. He had heard his parents arguing in the hospital when they thought he was asleep. He would learn later they had been trying to have another child but now it would have to be forgone. 

On the beach… they waited out on the beach for the sea. The scouring wind blew the thick white salt spume up over the sand. They watched men walk into the water with intent to swim across to England or else to die. In the night unsleeping they watched the boats go down in the channel with a sharp bright firework flare. There was screaming out on the water and overhead and in the city where the French and Belgians held whatever remained of the line. They had been running at that time for many days. He lay in the sand and waited for something to hit him but it never did. Eventually he was herded onto an elderly couple’s holidaymaking vessel with the remaining hollow-eyed filthy nineteen-year-olds of his regiment. He stood on the deck and watched the smoke spiral up into the heavy blackening clouds. 

In the hospital on Pianosa he had gone down to the sea as soon as he could walk unaided. Kelpies be damned. It was a clear night and the calm water refracting stars. The moon had not yet risen but it was nearly full. He stayed until he watched it leach up from beneath the water shocking clean white light into the world across the silent sea. 

\--

Remus slept there in the tent on the lake and woke at dawn with dreams he forgot. He packed everything up and walked back across the headland to the car in the driving rain and then he drove to town again for breakfast in the bar where the owner from a few days previous didn’t recognize him. It was only looking in at the skinny daily paper that he realized it was the full moon day. He had been meaning to drive back to Hagley but on account of this he took the southern route through Worcester so that he might stop in Cutnall Green. At around noon in a park in Hampton Lovett he was obliged to park the car and walk back into the woods to scry in a puddle. His clothing was soaked through still from the rain in Snowdonia and his teeth hadn’t quit chattering despite several warming charms (he’d never been too good at them) and he hadn’t time to stop for tea. And he itched as though his skin were a wool sweater. The good old itch of the bones and the grist. His knee had frozen up and he couldn’t crouch in the loam to scry so he was obliged to sit. The cold ground leached up through his wool trousers into his bones and that too itched. At last he had the feeling of the place and limped back to the car. 

It was way out down the farm road to Chaddesley Corbett. The rain had started coming in again like a bad radio signal in the low hills. They were still talking about Tunis on the BBC so he tuned between stations and listened to the static. 

When he was near the place he parked on the side of the road and Disillusioned the car. Then he walked limping in the shadows up the long driveway. It hadn’t been a manor house but nearly. There were beeches dying along the driveway which had been planted in no doubt geometrically significant intervals and now were rotting with a strange virus. The building itself was condemned, per the sun- and rain-bleached poster tacked on the door. The roof of the easterly wing had collapsed entirely. Still Remus went up to the door and knocked on it. 

There was a pale pink-yellow glow in the fields around, which were overgrown. Rain. The sun through the thin clouds. When he thought about it hard enough he could feel where the moon was on the other side of the world. His bad leg hurt so much he imagined the bone growing through his heel and through the rotting wooden stoop and through the thick clay soil and through the very core of the world to reach where the moon was. 

Eventually he sat down on the top step. There was no sound from inside the house, so perhaps they weren’t there anymore. He made a list inside his mind as had helped him arrange his thoughts since he was a child and particularly in the war. 1) He would count to one-hundred and then he would get up. 2) He would walk back down to the street and get in the car. 3) He would drive the car to Hagley and park it in front of the Six Arms. 4) He would go to the precinct and tell Black he needed to return to London and investigate an urgent lead. 5) He would go back to the room at the pub and get his identification and things and Apparate directly to the Registry. Black was not likely to believe there was an urgent lead in London after all Remus had told him before so he would have to invent one in the car. He revised the list but in doing so was obliged to reset his mental count to forty-five because he had forgotten where he was. And it was in process of this that someone opened the door. 

It was a tall black boy, wiry, hunted-looking eyes, with a joint, except it didn’t smell much like a joint. Perhaps he was eighteen. They studied one another for a moment in silence the way Remus had done with the kelpie. Like territorial dogs. Remus got up, which pained him, and the boy reached out to grab his wrist steadyingly in a clammy palm. 

“You need a place,” said the boy. 

“Yes.” 

“How’d you find us?” 

“Ladies in Bobbington.” 

“Yeah, Clara and them… she’s told us…” 

He swung wide the door. It was dark inside and smelled like rot. The windows were glassless and boarded and the carpets moth-eaten and thin. In the manner of most ill-maintained houses in Britain everything smelled and felt wet, especially the air. Remus went in anyway. The boy followed him. 

“We’ll go in the basement,” he said. “There's six of us. Seven with you.” 

“Lucky seven.” 

The boy didn’t find this funny. “Right,” he said. “You want a glass of water or, usually Gray has pills — ” 

“You have another joint?” 

“Not hashish.” 

“Then what is it?” 

The boy didn’t answer. Remus followed him into a kind of dayroom with miraculously intact windows. Beyond them was an overgrown garden refracted through the wet glass in a riot of patternless green. Three of the others were in there, half-asleep in water-stained chintz armchairs and chaises, clearly extremely high. “Clara’s friend,” said the boy from the door by way of introduction. There was a mumbled greeting. Remus sat beside the one called Gray, who indeed was gray; his clothes, hair, skin, eyes, everything about him seemed to have been leached of color. He was even younger than the boy from the door; it would have been presumptuous to assume he was sixteen. Outside a bird sang. Eventually the boy from the door’s joint made its way over to Remus and he took a hit. Rather quickly it was extremely obvious it was indeed not hashish and in fact it was some relative of morphine. The feeling was the same as he recalled from the war hospital when it had been administered intravenously from a clear bag — heavy and light at the same time. 

“Clara said you maybe would have questions,” prompted the boy from the door. 

He had almost forgotten. “Right.” 

“What sort of questions.” 

“Disappearances and things. I want to hear about them.” 

“Which ones,” said Gray. His voice was this color too. 

“All of them. Everything you know.” 

“Too many to keep track,” said one of the others. “We hardly leave here anymore.” 

“How do you eat?” 

“Summoning food.” 

“Risky.” 

“Not so bad. From the fields and things.” 

“No one around here thinks twice of, of a zucchini zooming through the air.” 

The opium joint came around to him again and he took another hit against the protestations of whatever rapidly decaying better judgement. Everything lost a little more definition and some of the knot in his brain unravelled just so. Beyond the window the overgrown garden seemed almost overwhelmingly beautiful and the movement of the breeze in the trees like a piece of a very long story being told which he might understand at the moment of death only… 

“No one around here notices us at all because they have bigger problems,” said the boy from the door. “Like the bloody bombs falling from the sky. Like their sons in Africa. Blah blah blah.” 

“None of you were enlisted?” 

“All of us are technically registered dead except for Keith.” 

Keith was the boy from the door. He passed a guiltyish hand through his wild hair. 

“How’d you manage that?” 

“Easy enough to bribe someone to file a death certificate.” 

“Is it really.” 

“There was a crooked funeral director for a while in Bromsgrove,” said another of the boys. 

“How do you pay for all this?” 

The boys looked to Gray, whose mouth moved. Not a smile. “Not with money,” he said. 

“We used to do farm work,” said one of the others in attempt to diffuse the cold and knowing silence that had followed Gray’s statement. “Picking squash and things.” 

Remus thanked god briefly that he was high. Otherwise he might’ve been a wreck. “How many have you lost,” he said. 

“Well the most of us there ever were was twenty.” 

“Here?” 

“No, we used to be north of here, on the Severn. Place called Hampden. That’s how we came to know Clara and them in Bobbington.” 

“That’s where it started? When?” 

“Just after the war did. In the winter — ’39 or ’40.” 

“It was after New Years,” said Keith. “So it was ’40.” 

“And then you lost fourteen of your — ”

“Eighteen,” Keith interrupted. He passed Remus the last ember of the joint. “It’s only Gray and me still left from then.” 

“Eighteen,” Remus said slowly. He had the feeling he was tasting the word. With the last inhalation from the joint all pain dissolved, even the psychic. It only was. 

“The rest of us are from this place in Pensax,” said another of the boys. “Four of us left of sixteen.” 

“Thirty of you in all,” Remus said. 

“Hundreds from around here.” 

“Do you know what he does to them?” 

He realized altogether too late he shouldn’t’ve said anything. The four pairs of blitzed eyes focused impossibly through their haze. 

“I suppose you do,” said Gray. He was rolling another joint in his lap. Into the fold of paper he was neatly arranging what looked like tiny balls of amber. Perhaps there was a little class in him, Remus realized, somewhere in his accent, his posture, turns of phrase; he might’ve interrogated this suspicion further were he not so high. 

“It’s for the creation of a Dark object,” Remus explained. “A rosary. It requires the use of a werewolf bone.” He showed them roughly in the back of his hand where it was located. “But it must be — acquired in a very certain way. And then the body must be disposed of in a very certain way.” 

“A rosary.” 

“It’s a sort of channeling. It allows one to speak with the dead.” 

“Why would one want to speak with the dead.” 

“I don’t know. Evidently they have something interesting to say.” 

Gray sparked the joint with magic. He offered it to Remus, who somehow found the wherewithal to abstain. It was likely the boys’ tolerance for the drug was a great deal higher than his own. 

“Have you seen anything?” Remus asked them hopelessly. “Heard any— ”

It was at this moment that someone called his name from nowhere. The drug muted the jolt of fear. He would have chalked it up to a hallucination were all the boys not staring at him, frozen, holding breath, the joint atomizing halfway to Gray’s mouth. Then the shout came again. “Lupin!” It was coming from his pocket. So he reached in and pulled out the goddamn two way mirror. On the other end was Black. He was in a rain slicker in some green world. 

“What?” Remus snapped. 

In his periphery he watched Keith and Gray exchange a meaningful look. 

“I think you should come here,” said Black. Blessedly, due to his restless eyes and psychic myopia, he seemed not to notice Remus’s surroundings. 

“Have you found something?” 

“Of course I have, of course I have, otherwise why would I call you.” 

Remus got to his feet. The room wavered. “Where are you?” 

“Just come to the crime scene.” 

There was only a shred of consciousness remaining urging him against it. The rest had been silenced by the drug, the moon, and the circumstances. “I’ll be there,” he said, “in fifteen minutes.” 

Black was still talking but Remus put the mirror in his pocket. Some amorphous muttering continued until it seemed Black put his away too. The boys were watching him. “Moonrise is in two hours,” said Keith. But it sounded like a dare. 

“I’m sorry,” Remus said, “something’s come up. I’ll be back. Has one of you got an owl?” 

“We use crows.” 

“Send me one at the Six Arms in Hagley. If anything happens — anything at all.” 

Gray walked Remus to the door through the dark halls. The joint had been left in the dayroom with Keith and the others. “He’ll find out about you soon enough,” Gray said in the open doorway. The golden-hour light was spilling in onto the moth-eaten carpet and the bare floorboards, stained with rot and something like blood. “If he hasn’t already. You _are_ his type in more ways than one.” 

It chilled Remus to the bone though he’d been wondering about it now since he had learned who Bella was. “What’s his type?” 

“Brunet. Suffering.” 

“Suffering?” 

“I don’t know. They even try to kill cows without frightening them because it makes the meat tougher.” 

Remus’s stomach twisted. “How does he even know? How does he know who we are — and where we live — ” 

“There are too few secrets around here, my mother used to say. That was because everybody knew she’d had three miscarriages.” 

Remus thought of something somehow through the several fogs. “Your folks were magic?” 

Gray just smiled the un-smile again in his narrow colorless mouth. There was so little of him it was hard to imagine there might be another. In some odd way he was very like the nothing boys from the war who had been scraped out inside by some terrible wound or witnessing. Perhaps it was quite simply a symptom of being hunted. Remus recalled a song from childhood ventures to church with his mother’s Muggle family: _there but for the grace of god go I…_

“The truth is there’s one secret,” Gray said. “Exactly one.” 

\--

Black was waiting in the dell by the tomb tree, swaying a little in the stiff evening breeze as to some invisible song. The environs had been returned now by the Saunders’ groundskeepers to the peaceful and contemplative state they’d dwelled in prior to the gruesome discovery. “I thought you might be dead,” Black told Remus by way of greeting. And they set off together on the gravel path down the hill toward Hagley Hall. 

Nothing felt quite real, which was perhaps why he couldn’t be bothered to care that he was this high and technically at work and the shadows were thickening as the afternoon raced ever toward dusk and doom. “I told you,” Remus said, “the experimental potion.” 

“So it worked? What’s in it?” 

“I’ve signed all this special paperwork saying I wouldn’t tell anyone. What did you find while I was gone?” 

“Not much til today.” 

“Well, what did you find today.” 

“There’s a greenhouse just behind the house.” 

“Why didn’t we see it when — ”

“I was thinking, what are those spells, like the ones on Hogwarts and things…” 

“Selective concealment. Nigh impossible to prove in court.” 

Black stopped in his tracks. “How in hell do you ever bring anybody to justice?” 

“What?” 

“Every bloody thing I say, you say, or James says, or someone says, you can’t prove it in court.” 

“Well you can’t,” Remus said. “I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know how they do it.” Black kicked a stone and it scuffled in the leaf loam among the wych elms. At another time how emotional and petulant he was might’ve seemed just about as funny as it was exasperating. But now was not that time. “Let’s go,” Remus said, dimly aware he probably sounded harried. “We’re losing light.” 

They went onward again through the stretching shadows. At first Remus didn’t see the greenhouse either. The cloudy, smudged glass was overgrown with ivy and frosted with condensate and a strange emerald algae. Spring had made a riot of the entire grounds but especially here, where the flora had been allowed to overgrow the bounds of the main garden’s Victorian propriety. The air was rich with the smell of rain and honeysuckle. It reminded Remus eerily of the view from the dayroom in the boys’ house in Cutnall Green. 

The door was around back of the greenhouse, facing the woods. Black jarred it open with his hip. Inside was an array of tables covered with pale blue bell-shaped flowers in terra-cotta planters. 

“Are these — ”

“Yes,” said Black. He took a crumpled page he’d magically copied from the botany book from the pocket of his coat and held it up to one of the blossoms in comparison. “Blue fritillary.” 

“I thought you said they were impossible to cultivate,” Remus said, wandering toward the back of the too-warm room. He shifted a tarp under one of the tables to reveal an array of magical pruning devices and soil-enriching potions. 

“I guess they’re not.” 

Also under the tarp was a tin bucket full to its brim with tiny and nondescript bulbs the color of bleached wood or bone. A few, those nearer the top, had been pierced through the middle with a thick needle or a similar implement, giving them the appearance of large beads. Remus fixed the tarp and they went back out into the overgrown garden again. “What’s this mean,” he asked Black. 

“Not entirely admissible, as you might say,” Black told him, digging his cigarettes out of his pocket. “They have a number of other entirely less Dark magical uses. More than being incriminating in this case it's conclusive proof that the Saunderses are unregistered wizards, which is a crime under the Grimsby Accords.” 

“Even if they’re in violation of the Grimsby Accords they’ll just incur a fine,” Remus said. They walked back together toward the forest. “Which these people could sneeze up instantly.” 

“But the National MLE will have to search the house to discern their tax bracket.” 

Remus paused. “Ah.” 

“Yes.” 

“Good one.” 

They walked on again. Remus’s knee was stiff and unwieldy but on account of the drug he felt only awkwardness. Black had noticed and had slowed his own pace of walking. It would hurt, Remus knew, badly, in the morning, all of it, like always, but it was easy to forget that sort of thing now… 

“We need one more piece of the rosary,” Black said thoughtfully, “to tie them to — ” 

He silenced abruptly and Remus heard instantly the sound he evidently had — a commotion on the path ahead. Emerging from amongst the trees was none other than Oliver Saunders, decked in outdoorsman’s finery, and with him were five rowdy hunting beagles whose black and tan coats matched the old leaf loam in the deep spreading shadows. “Detectives,” Saunders announced, opening his arms to show the soft, colorful wool lining his duck coat. The dogs had come running to bound around Remus and Black’s feet and leap up toward their pockets hopeful for treats. “What a lovely surprise.” 

“Quail hunting?” Black asked. 

“No — I’m not much of a shot I’m afraid. The dogs were getting cooped up. And I must admit I myself was too… This weather has been oppressive, has it not…” 

He shook Remus’s hand first, then Black’s, without removing his soft leather gloves. 

“Would you gentlemen like to come in for a cup of tea?” 

Black made a requisite attempt: “I’m afraid we’re rather in the middle of — ”

“Nonsense,” said Saunders, “I’m sure it’s nothing that can’t wait. I insist.” 

They walked together across the lawn with the dogs running delighted relays ahead and back on the bright and well-maintained grass. By the light in the sky perhaps there was an hour left of sun before the moon came up. 

“I hope you don’t mind that I ask, Detective,” said Saunders. “I’ve just noticed your limp.” 

“It’s quite alright,” Remus said. He found he could no longer be sure exactly why it took so much effort to string words together. “I served in the Royal Air Force. My bomber went down in Tuscany.” 

“When was this?” 

“Early last year.” 

“However did you survive?” 

It was a such a strange question it seemed to have silenced even the dogs. Black looked between Remus and Saunders illegibly. “Pure dumb luck,” Remus said. 

“Of course.” 

Inside they were ushered once more past the hooded sculptures and the chipping fresco and the fine furniture covered in sun- and tea-stained dust sheets into the sitting room. A valet was quietly tuning the piano; Saunders dispatched her for tea. Another emerged from a shadowy door to coax the dogs, who had gleefully muddied the once-fine moth-eaten Oriental carpet, back toward the door and the kennel again. 

“Have you any leads in the case,” said Saunders pleasantly over the beagles’ yapping. 

“I’m afraid we can’t say.” 

“Not even a hint?” 

“Not even a hint,” Black said. It seemed to Remus he was being incredibly magnanimous. Perhaps he had been given a talking-to. “It’s — I do wish we could. Quite simply it’s impossible to know what might end up being significant.” 

“And have you experience with cases like this one?” 

“Not really, to be honest. It seems nothing of this nature tends to happen in Worcestershire. A positive thing really. Indicative of the safety of the community. And the goodness of the people…” 

Remus realized altogether too late what Black was trying to do. He excused himself to the washroom. His heart was in his throat. It was only the hearty dose of opium, he realized, that kept him from feeling like a cornered animal. Before the war he had felt in these moments that he had somehow returned mentally if not physically to the precise moment in childhood in Colchester that he had realized something else was with him in the moonlit kitchen garden. After the war it had changed. They knew they were not alone in the cities. The enemy was not visible. He mistook the sound of bombers overhead for a ringing in his ears engendered by close-by gunfire. He wandered dying through the Italian hills like the mortally wounded villain at the end of a cowboy Western and sometimes heard music and hid in the dells not daring to breathe watching the wound in his leg pulse blood and worse through the makeshift bandages. 

The rooms of the grand estate were mostly empty and their condition not much better than that of the house he’d come from on the road to Chaddesley Corbett. The wallpaper was stained brown as tea with age and peeling and loosening toward the upper moulding and despite the frequent presence of fine ceramic bowls heaping with dusty potpourri the stink of the rotting glue could not be driven from the rooms. Under the dropcloths the furniture was upholstered in velvet and brocade and chintz, wine-stained and worn flat, springs collapsed; the fabric reeked of the mothballs which had been pressed between the cushions in cheesecloth bundles. The narrow halls hung with smoke-blackening old portraits and mirrors were shadowy and seemed to collapse in on themselves. In the kitchen maids in white bustled around each other wordlessly. 

He had been hit in the hills outside Siena. He had not even seen the Fiat CR-42 which had come from the West, out of the last late sun. It was a reconnaissance mission in which he had been instructed not to engage the enemy but rather to identify how many bombers they had on the ground at Poggibonsi. His own squadron leader had even already made a guess by magical means, scrying in a pool of rainwater on Pianosa, but this of course this information couldn’t be shared with the gruff American sergeant who commanded the Muggle regiment. The engine spluttered and cut pretty much instantly. Now it was only falling. He swung the plane and pulled the nose up into a shroud of black smoke through which the shadow of the enemy was visible as a hovering insect. He maneuvered the guns and fired. Then — at first he thought he’d been struck again — the certainty manifest like a bolt out of space…

“Excuse me,” said a little voice, “sir.” 

The maid who had been tuning the piano in the sitting room had grasped his shoulder. She held tea fixings on a tarnished silver tray expertly balanced on her forearm. They were standing together in a dark doorway. Past the threshold steep stairs resolved in the milky darkness. There was no dust. 

“I don’t think you mean to go down to the basement,” said the maid gently. 

“No — apologies — I was looking — ”

“Toilet’s back toward where you came from. Second door on the left. You were close.” 

“Thank you — and again — ”

“No apologies necessary,” said the maid. She closed the basement door carefully as though trying to keep the sound from waking someone. “The house is rather a maze…” 

In the washroom he cleaned his hands and face not daring to look at himself in the mirror. By his watch perhaps there was half an hour left. He went back out into the empty hall and back to the basement door to confirm that it had been real. 

His parents had kept him carefully sequestered. He had transformed in their reinforced basement all his life until he went to war. His father, a freelance cursebreaker who had once worked staunchly within the system, resented the Ministry’s irrepressible bureaucracy and would take Remus to the Werewolf Registry on snowy or rainy days when the place would be empty so as to avoid long waits or awkward conversations. In France there had been bunkers or basements. There had been another werewolf soldier who had died in Valenciennes but he had been turned as a child on vacation in America. He hadn’t been aware at that time that you were supposed to feel anything other than the way you felt when you met another wizard. And then the certainty, in the falling. It was the same certainty in the basement. 

There was a commotion down the hall and a clatter of doors. There was a presence also in all the portraits dragging something cold up the back of his neck. He walked as though something was after him and eventually he realized he was running. He burst in the door to the sitting room just in time to watch Black sweep all the tea supplies off the fine marble coffee table onto the floor. “I’ve just remembered something,” Remus said too loudly, watching the tea seep into the carpet. Saunders was watching between them with a bemusement suggesting the entire display was a show put on for his benefit. “We have to go.” 

“Not until I — ”

“Detective Black,” Remus announced. His head was spinning. Holy god but he felt it would come upon him any second. He had never given it this long in public company before. “We have to go. Now.” 

Saunders and the maids were all too happy to escort them out into the wet dusk. Remus held Black’s arm tightly between shoulder and elbow forcing him onward and also to support himself on the steps, which wouldn’t entirely develop in his woozy vision. They set off together across the wide rolling lawn. He could smell the coming night. The moon pulling up as on a string from just under the world. 

“You should’ve heard him, Lupin,” Black was seething indistinctly through the raging fog. “Even you might’ve done the same. I should think you would be pleased to find them dead, he says. I didn’t even tell him about — he thinks they’re prostitutes.” 

“He knows they’re not,” Remus told him. “She’s in the basement.” 

“Who — ”

“Catherine Claverack.” 

“Did you see her?” 

“No.” 

“Then how do you — ” 

It twisted. He leant away from Black and puked in the brush. 

“Lupin, what in hell — ” 

There was some growing understanding on the handsome face. Under the shock. Under the fear. 

“Who’s at the precinct.” 

His voice was not his voice. Black took a step back crunching in the leaf loam. “No one. It’s after five.” 

“Have you a magically reinforced cell.” 

“Yes — the last one in the line on the left — but — ” 

He focused into it. He felt the crack of his own Apparition as a glass breaking. The row of cells was empty. He pulled the door shut behind himself and locked it with a spark of shattering feral magic that broke out of him along with the rest of his consciousness. 

\--

The doctors at the hospital on Pianosa weren’t eligible for international bureaucracy reasons to make a report to the werewolf registry on what had changed about the wolf since the crash. So when Remus returned to London, exhausted, still healing, he was obliged to go the supervised transformation facility and request that one of the magical biologists observe his transformation and make notes which could be added to his file. When he woke up in the morning after the full moon it took him about twenty minutes longer than usual to stand and even when he did the bad knee wouldn’t bend. He struggled to dress and limped out into the hall where the biologist was napping against the wall. Remus dropped the walking stick he’d carried occasionally then as loudly as possible but still it took three drops before the biologist woke up. He handed the paperwork up to Remus and fell asleep again. 

_Animal is sedate. Licks left hind leg. Some change in patterning. Coat is white over left leg and hindquarters._ It was signed and initialed. He wanted terribly to burn it. Instead he brought it to the registry where he was obliged to wait for two hours to file it with the clerk. “Name,” she said. 

“Remus John Lupin.” 

“Birthdate.” 

“8 March 1917.” 

“And the date — ”

“15 February 1922.” 

“ — of your bite.” 

She looked up expectantly, waiting for him to say it again. “15 February 1922.” 

“And the reason for your visit.” 

“I need to file — ”

She snatched the form from his hand and skimmed over it. “Change of appearance.” 

“Yes.” 

“Caused by?” 

“Um, injury in combat.” 

She looked him up and down. Her gaze lingered on the walking stick, which he was trying to hide behind his leg. “They’re supposed to fill that out at the supervised transformation facility,” she said. 

“Yes. Well.” 

In the most put-upon conceivable manner she wet the tip of her quill in an inkwell. “Describe your combat injury,” she said. 

“My plane crashed.” 

She looked at him again skeptically. “ _You_ were in the RAF.” 

“Yes.” 

“Where?” 

“Italy.” 

“What airfield?” 

“Pianosa.” 

“Never heard of it.” 

It hurt so terribly to stand that he nearly snatched the paper back from her and tore it up. Yet even in desperation he understood the slightest violent movement would have you Stunned at best by the supervisory MLE officer who stood thoughtfully by every exit. 

“My plane crashed,” Remus told her again. “Everything broke. I don’t remember the names of all the bones.” 

“You’ll need a report from — ”

He had the write-up from the doctor which he dug from his pocket and passed across the desk to her. She had tensed at his sudden movement, as had the nearest watching officer. She unfolded it and began to read seemingly as slowly as was possible. 

“If you don’t — miss. I’m so sorry. Do you mind if I sit down.” 

She fixed him with a look as though shocked he might ask such a stupid question. Then she kept reading. “It needs to be initialed by the observer,” she said at last. 

“It is initialed,” Remus said, reaching across the divider and pointing it out on the sheet from the facility. The officer in the door took two big strides closer. Remus didn’t notice, because his leg hurt so much he almost couldn’t see. Even leaning all his weight against the good one didn’t seem to do anything. It was like a cold, devouring flame. 

“It’s supposed to be initialed here,” said the clerk. 

He bit inside his lip so hard he tasted a sudden salty rush of blood in his mouth. The clerk looked up at him expectantly. “I’m sorry,” Remus said measuredly. “I can bring it back tomorrow done properly.” 

“That won’t be necessary.” 

She marked the paperwork with several different stamps in several different shades of ink and at last she folded it all neatly and sealed it with a drip of red wax set with a print from a signet ring. By this time Remus had sat down on the floor and everyone in the establishment was staring at him. “All set,” said the clerk, waving his carbon copy of the paperwork over the divider. 

He stood painfully and accepted it. Everything spun. “Thank you for your service,” said the clerk. 

\--

He woke up. Wasn’t sure why every bloody time this felt like dying. His knee felt like a hinge which had rusted shut. And his head… well it didn’t even do to come up with a metaphor. He couldn’t see when he first opened his eyes but then slowly everything developed like a photograph in darkroom chemicals. The whitewashed cinderblocks, the cot, linens shredded, the shattered mirror. He pushed himself up on one elbow and everything spun. 

“I Vanished the glass,” said someone behind him. 

The photograph which was reality further developed, now metaphysically. He was in the magically reinforced cell in the basement of the precinct and the voice was Black’s. It took much of his remaining strength to reach for one of the blankets from the cot, rent as it was, and throw it over himself in some half-assed and certainly useless attempt to preserve his modesty. 

“I’ve been sitting here all night,” Black went on. “I didn’t know it would be like that. But I — the glass. Anyway, can I come in?” 

Remus looked back at him achingly over a shoulder. He was standing in the cell door daring to look wounded. “You’ve a key, haven’t you?” His voice was scraped so raw it made almost no sound. 

Black did, and the sound of the door opening mimicked the tone and texture of a machete being driven into Remus’s skull through his ear. Somehow he managed to sit up and lean against the cot. Black sat slowly across from him on the floor, cross-legged like a schoolchild listening to a lesson. “I didn’t know it would be like that,” he said again. 

“Like what.” 

“Just — like that.” He swallowed. He was looking past Remus’s shoulder at the wall the way the doctors he had seen as a child at St. Mungo’s had looked at his hairline instead of in his eyes. “I won’t tell anyone,” he said. 

“Right.” 

“I won’t. I mean it.” He waited for Remus to say something, but Remus didn’t. So he said, “Does it hurt?” 

“Does it — what do you think?” 

“It looked like it did.” 

“Everything changes places inside you. Everything grows and shrinks and moves around at once. Then it happens again at the end.” 

“I suppose I always thought it would be rather instantaneous.” 

“What would be the fun in that.” 

He tried to bend his knee, which barely worked. The hurt reached out like a strike of lightning into his glass-sharp headache. 

“What would you have done if you could’ve reached me,” said Black. 

“What do you think?” 

“Even — but you _know_ me.” 

“ _I_ know you.” 

“But — ”

“I’m not giving you a lesson,” Remus said, standing, bracing himself against the wall. Painfully he wrapped the torn blanket around himself. “Read a bloody book.” 

“I didn’t know there were — ”

“It must be so shocking for you, every time you have to realize other people have different lives.” He meant this to hurt and evidently it did. Black sulked into the cobwebby corner. “Have you got spare clothes,” Remus asked, sick of it already. 

“Upstairs. No one will be in for another few hours. Come on.” 

They went. He had to ask Black for help on the stairs because his knee wouldn’t bend properly. In the office he turned into the corner and put on a pair of trousers and an overlarge flannel shirt that Black unearthed under Potter’s desk. When he stood straight again he was lightheaded and had to sit in Potter’s desk chair. By that time Black had come back in with coffee and a sleeve of stale biscuits stolen from one of the Muggles’ desks. For a while unspeaking they filtered through the papers on Potter’s desk, until Black broke the silence: “What does it — all this. It must be — ” 

“It validates my suspicions.” 

“What suspicions?” 

“That no one cares if we die. No one cares but us.” 

Black looked like he wanted to say, “I care.” But he didn’t say anything at all. Perhaps he had realized he hadn’t really cared until less than a week ago. 

“He had her there,” Remus said. Distantly he was aware perhaps this sounded crazy. “She was there.” 

“You said that last night. How do you know?” 

“I could feel — it’s, I don’t know the magical theory. She was — is. She’s, like my sister.” 

“Your — ”

“You can sense the — presence, I guess, sometimes, of someone who was bit by the same master who bit you.” 

“Have you ever felt it before?” 

“Yeah,” Remus said. “In Italy.” From the cockpit, he didn’t bother to tell Black, of the Fiat which had shot his Spitfire down. Which he had then watched, shielded by smoke and bewildered by shock, plummet nose-first into the jewel-bright fields, the womb and tomb which was the earth. “It’s not — there's no conclusive proof,” he told Black. “Like every bloody thing else.” 

“We just have to figure out how to prove it.” 

“What do you need to get a warrant to search the property?” 

“Probably one more iota of hard evidence to add to the blue fritillary bulbs.” 

“He won’t make it easy.” 

“He lied to my face,” Black reminded him. “He’s feeling invincible. This is when they make mistakes.” 

“Who’s _they_.” 

“Killers. Or I suppose you could say evil people generally. I mean, look at Hitler.” 

Eventually Black went out for breakfast and the paper whilst Remus composed an owl to send to James delineating the circumstances in vaguely coded terms and politely requesting an update on the state of espionage in Knockturn Alley. Black came back in a few minutes with the _Times,_ whose front page announced that the Brits had run the Afrika Korps out of Tunis and the Americans had taken Bizerte, and the _Prophet_ , which also bore this news, and which confirmed the success of experimental magic now being used to pinpoint the locations of Nazi U-boats, and a grease-stained paper bag full of scones and pastries from the tea rooms down the road. “A letter came in for you, by the way,” Black said, mouth full of shortbread. “While you were in Snowdonia.” 

Remus read the letter while Black went up to the roof to send the missive to Potter with one of the Constabulary’s beady-eyed carrier pigeons. It was from Fenwick: _Remus, good to hear from you. I’ve copied the list below. Please note it’s nowhere near complete. Most sellers of these materials are far too intelligent to make themselves in any way known. All the below are registered as magical businesses in nations where harvesting and sale of these items is technically legal, complicating our pursuit of them… But we know there are definitely additional magical businesses working strictly illegally who are much more secretive._

_Boit & Sharkey (Most of their work is in Africa; of your creatures they likely only would deal in yeti and chimera) _

_Thierry & Fils (Quebecois firm, the only reliable known lethifold seller) _

_Katz Shipping and Contracting (Vladivostok-based firm: they will deal in yeti, kelpie, chimera. Igor Katz has a side business trafficking artifacts; if he’s the one you’re looking for, Control of Magical Objects might know more)_

_Ilene Reynard (Seattle independent contractor: the most reliable sasquatch seller)_

_Presidio Potions Suppliers (Texas-based firm: kelpie, chimera, they could probably be talked into lethifold for a price, but it’s likely they’d hire a contractor from T &F) _

_This might also interest you — we currently suspect there is a powerful middleman working out of the Birmingham area. There’s quite a bit of traffic into this vicinity and numerous materials have been seized… of what you’ve mentioned, only sasquatch items, but it’s quite likely the others might’ve got through. It’s quite likely we’re looking for a peer as some of these items are hugely valuable. But it seems there aren’t many magical peers in the West Midlands, which complicates things…_

_Hope this helps. Send me an owl when you’re back in London. — BF_

It was unlikely any of the sellers would give up client lists or anything else useful. It was likely that Saunders worked with them through this alleged middleman, or else contacted them through a form of messaging more secure and encrypted than owl. _There aren’t many magical peers in the West Midlands_ , Remus read again. He recalled something out of the fog from the day before. “Missing persons,” he said aloud, unable in exhaustion or confusion to articulate a full sentence. 

Black looked up from where he was wheedling through some of the papers on his desk, likely just to appear busy. “What?” 

“Is there — where do you keep missing persons information. Or actually maybe you just know.” 

“What would I just — ”

“I went to this house yesterday. There were these six boys, werewolf boys, teenagers. One of them I thought had some class about him.” 

They went together into the bullpen. The missing persons files were in a pale pink file cabinet that would hardly open for being jammed so full of paperwork. Thankfully none of the Muggle officers had elected to come in before nine. “There was a family in Wolverley,” Black said. “Five or six years ago. Their ten year old boy.” 

“Could be right.” 

“This was before everything, before the war… James and I were still in school. The cousin or something was a year ahead of us in Slytherin. There was just absolutely nothing, no leads… no trace. The old captain, Bucknell, talked about it sometimes when he got drunk enough because he thought it was the family. But of course they could never prove anything.” 

He unearthed the file from the cabinet and passed it to Remus. _Reynolds, Graham Wolverley_. Clipped to the paperwork was a small wallet-sized photograph like the sort which were taken of children in Muggle schools. Though he was younger and rounder in the face it was unmistakably the boy named Gray from the Cutnall Green house. 

“All the details got filtered down to us through the cousin,” Black went on. “The kid got taken from his bed or so they said. The window had been forced open from the outside. And there were traces of blood, in the bed, on the sill, and in the yard…” 

“Who were the wizarding detectives then?” 

“Just one — name of Lockwood. No one around here recalls him very fondly.” 

“Why’d he leave.” 

“He was taking — ” Black paused. Remus closed the folder and put it back in the cabinet. “Taking bribes. Is it him?” 

“What?” 

“Is the boy him.” 

“Yes, yes, it’s him. He said his folks were magic. And then he said, there’s only one secret around here.” 

“So is it all of them?” 

“All of who?”

“All the peers.” 

“It’s Reynolds and Saunders at least so we know now. And we only know for sure they’re in violation of the Grimsby Accords.” 

“It could get us warrants to search the houses,” Black said again. He was desperately clinging to this notion, perhaps fairly, as at present it was their only permissible lead. 

“We should go there first,” Remus told him, “to the Reynoldses, tomorrow, just to see.” In the darkest dustiest corners of his moon-bruised mind (the corners he usually left alone, because they frightened him) he was already imagining how delightful it would be to secure some removed vengeance for the Reynolds’ abandonment of their child, even if that vengeance was simply the pressure of a higher tax bracket. Never mind that that victory, like any potential victory in this case, seemed more deeply impossible every minute.

Black had leaned against the closest desk. He was watching the pale light through the high window move on the tile floor through the empty room. “It’s rather incredible how good they are at this,” he said eventually. “The Ministry declared the Grimsby Accords a total victory in 1891.” 

“That was a clever ruse to build confidence among the layfolk,” said Remus, who had believed this to be incredibly obvious. “They’ve all studied the law enough to know the way around it. And besides, as evidenced by your Lockwood it is still quite possible to pay one’s way out of trouble.” 

When he got up his knee wouldn’t quite hold his weight and he stumbled. Black reached for Remus’s wrist and he pulled away so quickly he overbalanced and almost fell. Some papers from one of the Muggles' desks fluttered to the floor. Black watched him test his foot under him again. “Have you a walking stick or something,” he said. Having been rebuffed he was trying to be a bit cruel; the palest note of it was in his voice. 

“Left it at home.” 

“You didn’t think — ”

“I didn’t think I would be here so long.” 

“Well are you glad?” 

He looked up, surprised at the question, and Black held eye contact for longer than Remus thought he had dared before in their acquaintance. The flighty silver shifted just so that he could tell for the first time that Black had meant it when he said he had stayed up all night watching in the hallway. At last when Remus thought something in the room might shatter in the force of this strangeness Black turned to the window again and his mouth pursed regretfully. 

Remus had been waiting: “I am glad. If it was anyone else they would’ve gone home by now.” 

The Worcestershire Constabulary would have been left where they had started, as it was only by Remus’s doing that they had noticed Bella’s lycanthropy. It was likely the case would’ve been shunted to the Muggle officers who would’ve exhausted the investigation the non-magic way and then shelved the files for good while all around in the country others kept dying. This was what came of cases involving the murders, however brutal, of people who were missed only by those who were similarly unimportant. 

“I’m going back to the Six Arms to bed,” Remus said. “You ought to sleep yourself. Come get me if you hear from Potter.” 

\--

He woke in the late afternoon to find it was raining and in the soft hypnotic sound of it and the fragrant breeze through the open window he fell asleep again. Eventually he went down to the Six Arms for dinner around seven to find that Black was already there midway through a large gin. When Remus sat Black passed a shred of pale parchment across the table, which bore only two words scrawled in Potter’s harried hand: 

_Crimson & Company_

“It’s the name of a shop on Knockturn Alley,” Black said. 

“Never heard of it.” 

“Well, you wouldn’t’ve.” 

The proprietor approached to tell them that his daughters were in the kitchen making a pot pie with some fresh mutton and would they like some. They both agreed, and also to two more large gins, which were swiftly produced. Across the pub toward the front window still lashed by the rain the proprietor had joined a gaggle of locals to talk football. 

“How might I never’ve heard of Crimson & Company,” Remus reminded Black. 

“Like their assumed patrons they operate above the law. Cash only. No formal business license. There’s a password which changes every few weeks or so, like a Muggle speakeasy from Prohibition times.” 

There was a sinking feeling in Remus’s gut or perhaps it was the gin on an empty stomach. “How do you know this?” 

“When my father’s cousins would come to London from Beaugency — ” He said the word with a perfect French lilt — “We would have our fine dragon steak meal at Antony’s and then go shopping.” 

“Your father’s — ”

“My mother’s side is even older blood. I know you’ve heard the name Lenoir.” 

“As in _Purist Stratagem_?” 

“Yes. Ghislain was my great-uncle. And — this should interest you — despite the famous name they successfully evaded the Accords until 1925. The Blacks would’ve but for our seat on the Wizengamot, though we still reliably vote against mandatory disclosure of magical status. Even still there are unregistered properties though it would probably be dangerous for either of us to set foot there.” 

“Why dangerous for you?” 

“I was disowned when I was twelve. James didn’t tell you?” 

“Why would James — ”

“It doesn’t matter. It’s why we’re like brothers.” 

This was too rich a wealth of information to take in, having freshly woken from a long nap and polished off the gin. “Let’s go back to the beginning,” Remus said. “What do they sell at Crimson & Company?” 

“This rosary would be outside their purview,” Black told him, “but not by far. Antiques and oddities mostly. My father had a standing order for giant squid beaks preserved in ambergris, who knows what for.” 

“Then why sell it.” 

“Like every shop on Knockturn they sell what’s in demand to people who have everything they could ever dream of and more. What would you want if you had everything?” 

“My knee back,” Remus said, without thinking. Perhaps if he’d thought about it more he might’ve mentioned the other thing. 

Black paused. The daughters from the kitchen had brought pot pies and mushy peas on chipped and mismatched china plates. When they had left Black fixed Remus bravely in the eyes again. “It’s not — real?” 

Remus felt himself flush. It was his turn to look away, toward the smoke-frosted mirror behind the bar. “It is — well. There’s metal plates inside it, but that’s not what we were talking about — ” 

“Metal plates,” Black repeated thoughtfully, “inside it.” 

“Why did you want to know,” Remus asked him, to change the subject. 

“I figured most people would want something they had long ago they can’t get back again.” 

“Well then what would you want?” 

“To be back how I was. When I could sleep. It’s simple really.” 

As far as Remus could tell none of this was simple. “What is?” 

“The hardship they want to forget is that they have to answer to the law now like anyone else. This is — the rosary gives them even the barest way to relive the past. It's the sort of thing they love.” 

“So the whole thing is like a parlor trick?” 

“Probably. Like the first family on the block to have a phonograph.” 

It should not have surprised him, he thought, that there was likely no deeper or more sinister significance to it all than simply the whims of those with money who remembered with lustful nostalgia the days in which they had had even more. 

“Why are you only telling me this now,” Remus said. 

“I was thinking about it when you were asleep. About going to Crimson’s. I was yay big.” He gestured against the floor around the height of the high table. “There were these cupboards with glass doors and there were skulls inside — horrible mutated human skulls with massive jewels set in the eyes.” 

“Jesus.” 

“My father said they had some, like a facility somewhere where they bred — but I won’t say any more.” 

The imagination chilled him deeper than bones. “They’ll take any reminder of their supremacy at any cost.” 

“Yes.” 

“So why did they disown you?” 

He had not touched his pot pie and nor had Black touched his. Back in London he had never been allowed to interrogate suspects — that work was left to those experienced with spells like _priori incantatum_ , the low-dose variety of _Imperius_ allowable under law enforcement circumstances, and assorted magics usually used in the construction and filling of Pensieves — but he expected this was why certain among his coworkers found it so exciting. It was thrilling to have the first blush of a story and pull it like a loose thread. 

“I’d begun to realize when I was young but it got quicker when I went to school. The way things really are, you know.” 

“The way they really — ”

“That the world isn’t made for the every whim of some people only and damn the rest. That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?” 

He fixed Remus again with the bright silver eyes which bore the all-too-familiar expression of desperate need to have said the right thing. Something about this expression, troublingly, was sympathetic this time, now that all this was on the table. He was trying so hard to be good. It seemed now that the bullet that had struck him in Flanders had shattered the thin, new-spun membrane in his mind that contained his empathy, and now nothing contained it at all, like a child’s brain. 

“What is the world made for, then,” Remus asked him. 

Black looked past Remus's shoulder toward the kitchen. From the front of the pub the proprietor and his football chums were laughing uproariously against the percussive machine-gun sound of the rain washing heavily now over the roof. Remus watched Black; his mouth moved, trying potentialities. Obviously it was a question with no answer or at least nobody had come to a satisfactory one yet. They were still too busy trying to topple the previous assumption against sophisticated opposition. Eventually Black met his eyes for a chilling moment in which Remus thought perhaps he was on the verge of tears. But then he looked away over Remus’s shoulder again with an expression of suffocating embarrassment. “Your pie’s getting cold,” Remus reminded him. 

\--

Drunk, they went out on the street for cigarettes under the dripping eaves. Black walked Remus back to the stairs up to the rooms above and then followed him up said stairs and down the narrow dark smoke-smelling hallway expostulating on the meaning of existence and the writings of old Muggle philosophers, his memories of which had been shuffled by his brain injury or so he claimed. “If we’re to understand that every man is born with unalienable rights— ”

“What about women?” 

“ — you know what I mean! If every _person_ is born with unalienable rights — ”

“What about someone like me?” 

“Well you are a person!” 

“Maybe right now. You saw — ”

“You are a person,” Black said, as though he’d decided it and so it was inarguable fact. 

“It doesn’t matter what any of the Muggle philosophers said because your family’s sort would have you believe every single one of their arguments null and void due to their being born without magic.” 

“There have to be good wizarding philosophers.” 

“There aren’t. Well, if there were nobody knows them.” Remus was drunk too: “It’s the same as what you said the other day. How do we ever bring anyone to justice when nothing’s admissible in court. Well nothing’s admissible in court because the laws were developed so they could be undermined.” 

“What’s that have to do with philosophy?” 

“Wizarding philosophy was either written so it could be undermined or undermined by the establishment post-publication because of who wrote it.” 

“How do you even know all this.” 

They were outside the door to Remus’s rooms upon which the proprietor had hung a wreath around Christmas which was now brown and wilting crunched pine needles onto the hideously carpeted floor. 

“My da and his friends he’d bring around, cursebreakers from the Ministry and suchlike. What, you didn’t learn about it at Old Hogwarts.” 

“No,” Black said woundedly. He was watching Remus dig for the room key in his pocket. “We didn’t learn about a lot of things.” 

“I can tell.” He found the key. Black stepped back just so away from the doorknob so that he could open it. “There’s no booze inside,” Remus told him. 

“What?” 

“I can’t invite you in for a bloody drink or tea or any of it. There isn’t even a hotplate.” 

“I don’t — that’s not — well. Goodnight then.” 

“Goodnight.” 

He stepped through the door already understanding what would happen, which was that Black reached for his shoulder and kissed him. He tasted like gin and salt. His tongue touched Remus’s lower lip and Remus’s jaw shifted in shock; Black lunged forward, unartful, devouring, his tongue like an oyster or something else disgusting, slick, slipping against the roof of Remus’s mouth. They stumbled through the door into the small and spartan room; Remus’s back hit the wall and a framed portrait shook and clattered against the stucco. At the sound of it Black pulled away, as though the noise had woken him up from some erotic reverie. Remus had by this point thrown all caution and sense out the open window into the night rain and grabbed Black by the lapels to pull him stumblingly close again. 

The rain washed the street and the trees moved the in the wind. They went to bed and Remus ran his hands through Black’s hair feeling for the scar he knew had to be there but also just to feel. Eventually the air raid siren went off and they lay for awhile in a startled stillness. Then it sounded the all-clear again. “Is this where,” said Black. He was whispering for some reason. 

“That’s from the plane,” Remus told him. “It’s mostly from the plane.” 

It had been on his thigh but it had burned. He didn’t like talking about it. He thought for a while in the hospital perhaps the fact that the scar was gone now meant that it was all gone now. But of course it hadn’t been true and the creature had torn off all the new skin. 

“Oh,” said Black. 

“I found yours,” Remus went on to change the subject. It was just behind Black’s ear. He rubbed his index finger over it a few times and then he found he was combing Black’s hair through his fingers by accident. “I’ve been looking for it for a long time.” 

“I know you have.” 

“I thought maybe you were just an asshole.” 

“I was before,” Black said, “in a different way. I think. I was a cocky — you know, Quidditch star… it feels like it happened to someone else.” 

It did happen to someone else, Remus almost said, don’t you understand, that was a kind of second womb, another bloody birth we got forced through alive and screaming, it changed us, that’s what war does… 

Instead he said, “Fuck me.” 

“What?” 

“You heard me.” 

“But — ”

“We can talk about all that another time.” He passed his thumb over Black’s eyebrow which had cocked in surprise or something halfway up his forehead. He hadn't meant for this to be tender but it was heading that way. “Please,” he said. 

Sex, in his limited experience, tended to mystify him for the ways in which it seemed to lend itself to and facilitate skillful nonverbal communication, at which usually he was less than adept. Black slicked his cock with grease from a well-used tin and with this same unguent prepared Remus roughly with two fingers. Then he sat up against the headboard of the bed, lazily stroking himself. Surrounded by the ecstasy of fluffy pillows and woven blankets he looked very like some lecherous aristocrat. Remus realized what he wanted with a frisson of intoxicating embarrassment. In the lowly murmuring piece of his brain not yet drowned out by the golden roar of arousal he thought about saying, it’s my way or not at all. Instead he went to Black and straddled his lap, back to his chest, face burning. A hand wrapped his hip and guided him low until he felt the pressure of Black’s cock against him, pressing just inside, a purging burn and stretch… then the guiding hand was gone. 

He stared blindly across the room. Breath exploding him. At last he gathered his voice — “What?” 

A gentle touch — a knuckle or a fingertip — to his tailbone. “Take it at your pace.” 

Good god. “Fuck you,” he said. 

“You asked.” 

“I did.” 

“Is it what you want?” 

“Yes, yes, of course — ” 

Black was trying for cool impatience but his voice cracked. “Get on with it, then,” he said. 

Remus did, slowly, trying and failing to make no sound. His knee hurt. Black had grasped his hips again, steadying, and Remus could feel him intently watching himself enter, the desperation of his breath, could feel, intimately, every inch of what his body opened to let inside, hot, thick, heavy… 

When he had sat fully after what seemed an eternity Black pulled him back against his chest and stroked his belly. Something about it was almost too intimate to bear. He shifted, seeking a twist of pleasure he knew was somewhere inside him, and gasped when Black’s cock slid deeper still. “Don’t move,” Black said. The wet inside of his lip brushed Remus’s ear. 

“I need to.” 

“No you don’t.” 

“Says — says you.” 

“I know what you need,” Black whispered in his ear. He shivered. 

“How can you possibly know that.” 

“I can feel it.” 

He tried to pull himself away just to make something happen. When Black pulled him back it jolted that twist of something deep inside him that melted him like butter over the other body and the bed. “See,” said Black. 

I did that, you fucking idiot, Remus almost said, couldn’t say. The callused pad of Black’s thumb traced a torturous arc along the stretch of him where they were joined. 

He almost regretted that what with his knee he lacked the flexibility to fuck like this. They were obliged to shift so that they lay on their sides in the big bed. Black’s hand pressed between Remus’s hips, the heel of it against the slamming pulse there, as he fucked long, slow strokes inside. Toward the last this devolved into Remus on his stomach, legs splayed in the tangled sheets, shoving back unartfully against Black’s clumsy thrusts, until blinding white light inside which was every feeling at once shocked him silent and senseless. From these heights he descended into the unmistakable feeling of Black licking him clean. He mumbled something like shocked protest against the blankets but if Black heard this evidently it was canceled out by his body’s evident yearning. The pad of a finger touched against and circled his raw rim and slipped inside meeting no resistance and soon enough it was joined by another, opening him again, gently, carefully, like a jeweler setting gems, and at last Black’s tongue pressed inside him, at which point Remus started crying, not even really realizing he was crying and not for any particular reason, but rather because there was nothing else to do or feel, or if there was he had forgotten about it. 

The moon moved like a dancer upon the floor. 

\--

He woke sore in the morning to indistinct pleasure which focused into Black’s head between his legs again. He was unused to fucking of any variety besides the quick and furtive and it surprised him to have slept naked in bed tangled with someone all night. He supposed he hadn’t thought it was possible, never mind that he was the sort of person who might be allowed it or might enjoy it. Eventually he stopped supposing at all. Black swallowed when he came and then lay beside him in the bed, palming his own erection, watching Remus imploringly while he caught his breath. What are you supposed to say, he wondered, to someone with whom you are embroiled like this, who you don’t have a ton of professional respect for, who has been inside you, who you want to be inside you again, who wants to be inside you again… In lieu of saying anything at all he took Black in hand and jerked him off a little vengefully. Then they lay in silence together watching the day gather in the window. 

“Tonight — ”

“Yes,” Remus said, not thinking; sometime in the night on the edge of nightmare sleep he had reasoned he was going to tell Black it couldn’t happen again, but now that seemed very stupid and anyway impossible. “Come back here tonight.” As though they would not spend the entire day together shoving against the stone in another way. By the clock at the bedside with Black’s watch and one of his cufflinks it was just before seven. “We have to Apparate to Cutnall Green and get the car,” he said. 

Black got up to seek his rumpled clothes on the floor where they had been discarded. “Right,” he said. “Might’ve done it yesterday.” 

“I forgot. In all the excitement. It’ll be — it’s Disillusioned.” 

“You ought to go then because I’ll never find it.” 

He stood at the bedside putting his watch on, looking down at Remus with an imperious and wry kind of smirk. Meanwhile in whatever evil and long-dormant place in Remus’s brain held these sorts of things for safekeeping and humiliation the kaleidoscope of erotic images from the evening previous was developing in full-color filmic stretches of skin and sounds and he wondered if perhaps he should put his foot down and take back the invitation. He had his mouth open to say something when Black leant over him and kissed it. Downstairs in the pub the daughters had started to play classical music on the radio as they did whilst they mopped the floors every other morning. Eventually Remus opened his mouth. He touched Black’s shoulder inside his shirt which was unbuttoned still. Then time flattened and shifted in time with the horns and the strings. 

“Have breakfast for me,” Remus said eventually.

“Sure — where?” 

“At the station — I’ll be back with the car by nine I hope. With extra bacon and a hot tea. Earl Grey. Please.” 

“Then what.” 

“I don’t know. The Reynoldses.” 

Black groaned comically and extremely loudly and Remus lunged to cover his mouth with his hand but was intercepted by the wrist. He was obliged to escort Black to the door, kissing, stumbling over discarded clothes and pillows and bedsheets, because he wouldn’t let go, and the expression on his face suggested he felt the closing of the door as a sort of severance of a limb. Remus stood by the door for a while listening to Black leave down the hallway as slowly as was humanly possible, and to the classical music from downstairs — the girls liked the violent sort — and to his own heart, which was misbehaving in his ears, to the old rain running off the eaves, wondering if perhaps most people felt like this (eg. completely thunderously shocked) when they were teenagers and as such could relegate it to the multifold traumatic experience of becoming, wondering, in the cold shower, dressing in his rumpled clothes from the floor, cleaning up the tiny disheveled room with magic, watching himself, at last, in the mirror in the bathroom, turning the collar of his overcoat up to hide the purple suck bruise, wondering if he had ever had a worse idea. 

\--

At the precinct when Remus arrived at nine with the car Black was being enthusiastically chewed out by the Muggle police captain. The door to the captain’s office was closed but the shouts were audible through the glass. “He said to send you in,” said one of the Muggle officers, glancing up at Remus from official-looking paperwork on which he was doodling. 

He opened the door to the captain’s office in the middle of “ — unreliability and insubordination!” Both red faces turned to him on the threshold. “You,” the captain said, venomously, despite the fact that Remus was technically his superior by the fictional Scotland Yard credentials as well as the real Ministry ones. 

“Sir.” 

“I’ve had a call from the younger Mr. Saunders this morning.” 

“Have you?” 

“He says _you_ attempted unwarranted search of his house while _this one_ destroyed priceless family property!” 

“It was one teacup,” Black roared, half standing, “they fell on the goddamn rug, I keep telling you — ” 

“Those teacups are worth more apiece than your bloody flat, Black! He’s threatened to sue!” The captain pinched the bridge of his nose between two fingers and at last turned to Remus. “What do you have to say for yourself?” 

“I got lost on the way to the toilet.” 

“Please. What a pathetic excuse.” 

“Sir, with all due respect, have you been in the house; it’s a maze — ”

“I’ve had enough. I’m this close to pulling _you_ from this case — ” He jabbed a finger toward each of them in turn — “and sending _you_ back to London with the bloody opposite of my compliments. It’s been over a week and you can’t tell me _anything_ — ” 

Black looked up at Remus in a way he probably thought was surreptitious. His mouth was just open. Something like a chill but warm raked a feather-light touch up Remus’s spine. 

“Saunders knows more than he’s letting on,” Remus told the captain. 

“You’re not suggesting — ”

“I am more than suggesting.” 

The captain stood. Competitively, Black stood too. The chair scraped back in the long groove scarred in the pale wood floor. “You’d do well,” said the captain, “to take your _suggestion_ , and shove it — ” 

Remus turned on his heel and went out the door. Shouting followed, and the cow-eyed incredulousness of all the Muggle officers. He had left the car parked outside the precinct and was in it with the engine running before Black was down the steps. “He’s calling Scotland Yard,” Black said when he got in. 

“We’ve maybe two days then.” 

“Until what?” 

“Until they pull me off.”

“Right.” 

Remus stepped on the gas and the car jumped forward. 

“I had breakfast for you,” Black said regretfully. He was wringing his hands in what seemed to Remus the embarrassed gesture of a much older man. “It’s inside on my desk.” 

“Thanks.” 

“He just called me in before — ”

“It’s really alright.” 

It was a quick drive to Wolverley. After a while Black put the radio on. The announcer was talking about the victory in Tunis, and eventually the tone of conversation reached a propagandistic fever pitch; to Remus’s surprise, Black lunged for the dashboard and turned it off again. 

“If it’s my fault they send you — ”

“It’s not your fault.” 

“I should’ve tried harder to keep my cool. Just — those things he said — ” 

“He would’ve said worse if he could’ve told you about them how they really were,” Remus reminded him. He wondered what Black might’ve done then. “My father had this old friend he got to come up from London to teach me magical creatures, care and feeding, and all that. He worked in the Control Department at the Ministry. Of course he didn’t — you know, he didn’t know, no one knew, and we couldn’t exactly say anything, but he said — I can’t even tell you the things he said. And my father was right there, nodding along. Like, oh, yes, quite.” 

“How old were you?” 

“Thirteen or so. Rather ruined my father for me. So maybe you shouldn’t feel so bad about losing the plot.” 

“What if it loses us the case?” Remus had hoped he wouldn’t ask that. He bit his lip on what he wanted to say, which was, the case was lost anyway from the moment we found the bones. 

\--

The remaining Reynoldses lived in a stately manor house on the edge of town befit with gardens and gables and a long narrow driveway lined with spring-burgeoning beech and rhododendron. It was the same house from which the family’s only son and heir had been kidnapped in 1937. Conversation and speculation on the matter had in large part been settled by the interim years and the overarching pressure of the war and yet the place bore an undiffused air of silence and tragedy; though it was better maintained than the Saunders’ residence, the windows were hung with black drapery, and the fine floral wallpaper bore artful geometric shadow-stains where offending portraits and photographs had been removed. Remus found the whole thing rather ridiculous given that he had been smoking opium with the boy whose disappearance had motivated this extremely public display of grief not three days previous. 

The Lady Reynolds’ valet brought them a fine deep red darjeeling tea in a colorful china pot. “This is a very fine piece,” Black said to her. 

“ _Hizen-yaki_ ,” said the valet, “from Japan. Imported long before Hirohito, of course.” 

“Of course. Does the lady — ”

“She prefers Japanese porcelain, and so did her mother… there are phenomenal pieces I won’t use for fear of chipping.” 

She curtseyed and departed around the door toward the kitchen. “Don’t break any of this,” Remus told Black. 

“It’s the same kind of thing Saunders had,” Black told him. “I asked him too. So I already have broken some of it.” 

“Everybody and their mother has fancy porcelain.” 

“Not this. It’s extremely — ” 

They were interrupted by the entrance of the Lady Reynolds. She was very petite, and, oddly, she wore voluminous pants. Less oddly, she wore head-to-toe black. Her dark, graying hair was arranged in a messy bun and a few strands framed her face. There was some of her son in her expression of interrupted consternation. Remus and Black had gotten to their feet to greet her politely, each with a clasp of her small hand. The fission of her secret magic passed a jolt through Remus’s knuckles. “We were admiring your _hizen-yaki_ ,” Black told her, mangling the Japanese. 

Reynolds sat delicately in a sun-bleached chintz armchair. “Are you a connoisseur of porcelain?” she asked. 

“Just a hobbyist.” 

“I was going to say. I did not think police officers, even detectives, drew the sort of money to truly be collectors.” 

She smiled placidly, with no teeth, as though this were a cool compliment preceding friendly conversation. “Um,” said Black. It seemed significant that even he, scion (albeit disgraced) of a pureblood family, was at a loss. 

“Forgive me my bluntness,” said Reynolds. “I’ve rather lost my patience for policemen after all these years.” 

“Yes — we understand. And we don’t mean to open any old wounds but — ” 

“You already have. Just the sight of your car in the drive is a wound to a mother in my position. So there’s no harm now in a conversation, is there?” 

She had a way of asking questions that suggested she was daring her listener to answer. Her hands were folded neatly in her lap. Despite her seeming delicateness, Remus reminded himself, she had abandoned her child when he became inconvenient. Now she contributed in some indistinct way to a localized industry which profited from tax evasion and murder. “What do you remember,” Remus asked her, “from the night of your son’s — ”

“This isn’t on file? Captain Bucknell took meticulous notes.” 

“Roger Bucknell is no longer captain of the Worcestershire Constabulary,” Sirius told her. 

“Just as well. I told him the truth, which I’ll also tell you, which is that it was just another night, until the morning.” 

“Nothing out of the — ”

“ — nothing out of the ordinary whatsoever. But you haven’t come here to waste my time, have you?” 

There was a very uncomfortable pause which Black took it upon himself to make more uncomfortable. “Have you a washroom, Lady Reynolds?” 

Her expression of consternation magnified impossibly with the furrowing of her brow. Still she called for one of the servants — the valet, Rose — to escort him. When they had left the room she turned to Remus. Her eyes were furious and he could hear her struggle to keep its inflection from her voice. “How about you ask me what you’ve really come to ask me,” she said evenly. 

“I came to tell you that I’ve seen your boy.” 

She settled back in her chair. The only evidence of feeling she displayed was the ghost of a smile playing about her very narrow lips. “So have I, Detective. One’s mind can be fooled.” 

“Can it.” 

“Of course. Grief can do it, among other things.” 

“We’ve found skeletons,” Remus told her. “Well, one skeleton — ”

“Is it his?” 

“No — of course not.” 

“Then why would it concern me.” 

“It suggests there is a larger issue. Someone in this county is killing with impunity. The victims are — like your son.” 

“Like my son.” 

“Yes.” 

How to say it to her without the words… 

“There is an element of ritual to it,” Remus went on. He felt possessed by an extremely belated, unfocused vengeance. “The killer enjoys their fear and their suffering. It contributes to the work. He cuts a bone out of the hand while they live — ”

“Why are you telling me this.” 

“I think you kn— I think you _should_ know.” 

She watched him. She seemed to be puzzling out if he were serious. 

“I want you to know what the cost is,” Remus said. He could neither identify nor control the locked place in his mind these words came from now. He thought it was the place where he buried unsolvable hurts like acorns or treasure until they festered and rotted and spread poison. “The cost beyond money.” 

She almost smiled, but it was more like a grimace, stretching the loose crepe skin of her face into a mask. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” 

“I thought you said there was no harm in a conversation.” 

“This isn’t a conversation anymore. This is why you no longer work with Captain Bucknell, Detective.” She stood up from her char and took a measured step toward Remus, who stood as well, certain he would not be able to stomach the sight of her looking down at him. “I suggest you leave my house,” she said. “I thought the Constabulary would no longer stoop so low as to harass a grieving mother.” 

“What precisely are you grieving.” 

“Losing my only heir.” She stood close to him now. She was a good twelve inches shorter but her venomous whisper carried. “Losing him to something monstrous.”

It was so imperfectly close to a confession. 

“Get out of my house,” Reynolds said again. “You fucking animal.” 

\--

Black drove. They took the back roads out of town along the Stour. He explained to Remus that the valet had told him the Japanese porcelain was procured for the Reynoldses by a trader called Igor. 

“So what.” 

“I read your letter from your friend yesterday afternoon when you were sleeping. A man called Igor runs Katz Shipping and Consulting in Vladivostok and they do artifacts as well as creature products.” 

“Don’t call it _creature products._ ” 

“Fine. Potions and spellwork supplies sourced from magical creatures and part-human beings.” Black paused. Remus wondered if he was expecting approval or congratulations, neither of which were forthcoming. “Anyway _hizen-yaki_ is so rare that it’s a reliable connection between Reynolds and Saunders — so we can presume his is from Katz as well. And Katz deals yeti and chimera.” 

Remus looked past him out the window at the countryside and the fields and the narrow lovely roads and far below the river and the canal recalling sometimes at war — in the dust-gold Italian hills — he had remembered the look of this landscape longingly as though it might sustain him. “I’ll write to Artifact Control from the precinct.” 

“Maybe we shouldn’t go to the precinct. The lady might call and I can’t deal with Bosworth.” 

“Then where.” 

“Back to bed…” 

It felt unspeakably improper for it to be invoked in the day. “No,” Remus said. 

Black pouted a little toward the window. Probably he was unaccustomed to being denied. “Suit yourself,” he said. 

They went to a pub in Stourbridge where Black claimed to have never been before, though the barmaid recognized him. They drank. Remus told Black what the Lady Reynolds had said. Under the table Black pressed the toe of his loafer against the toe of Remus’s boot. In the soft silver eyes and furrowed brow the childish confused concern Remus had noted the evening previous was so intense that he thought for a shocking moment it might bring him to tears. “How could she say those things?” Black said. 

“How do you think.” 

“It was a rhetorical — ”

“For god’s sake I don’t know why these things continue to surprise you. What was all that last night — ” Black flushed. For Remus’s part his own face felt hot. “ — about, now I see what the world was made for…” 

“I know how — if she could’ve disowned her son because of what happened. What did you say: proof of supremacy at any cost.” 

“They don’t think that we’re human — that we feel, you know, anything, pain, any of it. She thinks — she won’t care if he, if he starves to death, or if Saunders dissects and murders him before then. He isn’t her son anymore in her mind.” 

Black looked up and around the cavernous room. The barmaid was talking intently with the lone other patron toward the door. Outside, again, as ever, it had begun to rain. Black reached across the table and clasped Remus’s wrist. His hand was clammy and as ever his attempt at eye contact a little wanting. “You are incredibly — so deeply human,” he said. 

“Well I know that,” Remus lied. 

“I wanted you before,” Black told him for some reason. “When we met. I didn’t want you to think it was about something else.” 

“Fucking a werewolf.” 

“I didn’t — honestly I thought you might want it the other way.” 

“Is that what you — ” 

“ — not usually. So I’m, I was glad — more than glad. That you trusted me. Have you slept with anyone else who knew.” 

“No.” 

“I didn’t think so.” 

Remus pulled his wrist away and held it in his lap under the table. 

“Don’t be ashamed,” Black told him. It seemed to cause him physical pain to look Remus in the eye but valiantly he tried it anyway. His hand was still open on the table beside Remus’s empty pint glass. 

“I’m not ashamed,” Remus said. He wasn’t sure whether it was true or not. He couldn’t stand to wonder at the answer or discuss what was supposed to be permanently undiscussed any longer and as such he pointedly changed the subject. “What are we going to do.” 

“I’ve no idea.” 

“You had one, just the other day.” 

“Are you sure?” 

Remus emphatically wasn’t. It was rather likely it would do more harm than good. But because it was the only way, and because he was very tired, and because it was all doomed anyway, he said, “Yes, I am sure.” 

\--

In the early evening they went back around Black’s flat and Remus waited outside in the backyard until Black came down with his owl, with whom they sent two letters: one to Artifact Control at the Ministry, asking after the whereabouts and known associates of Igor Katz, and one to Remus’s supervisor at the National Department of Magical Law Enforcement, Robert Lansing, reporting Grimsby Accord violations on the estates of Oliver Saunders, Viscount Cobham, and Laurentine Reynolds, Lady Wolverley. They waited together watching the bird until it was out of sight. Then they went back together, careful to avoid the vicinity of the precinct, to Remus’s room above the Six Arms. 

Downstairs there was chatter and laughter in the bar. In the tiny bed they undressed one another unspeaking. Outside the rain had not abated. Far off across the fields and hills it thundered. The touch of another naked body everywhere against his own felt like some powerful healing salve for wounds which were so old he had forgotten they were open still. When Black entered him he felt an inexplicable and enormous sense of relief. He pressed deep, achingly slowly, yearning even when he was fully seated, as though he would crawl inside, all of him, and waited for something, searching Remus’s face, shifting minutely. “What does it feel like,” he said. 

“What?” 

“I said — ”

“But why do you want to know?” 

“You just look — I can’t — ”

“It feels good.”

“Does it?” 

“Like — ”He shifted his legs up Black’s side, ignoring the twinge in his knee. Black pulled out to the head of his cock and Remus felt the heartbeat there, where they were joined, the perfect stretch, the curious touch of Black’s fingers against his hole; he found, to his shock, that he wanted that too, wanted all of it, wanted it terribly, too terribly to say. The next thrust met him where he needed. “There,” he said. 

“What’s there?” 

“Sirius — ”

“Please — just tell me.” 

“I don’t know — it’s, like a spark — ” 

Black shifted back just so and pressed deep inside again against that place. The words in Remus’s throat manifest like a little wounded cry. “What does it feel like,” Black said in his ear. There was a raw desperation in his voice that went beyond the physical obvious. 

“Good,” Remus told him, “I keep telling you — ”

Black’s hips circled against his restlessly pressing the edge of him sharper in great washing waves of feeling against that thing. “How good?” he asked, his mouth wet at Remus’s ear. 

The answer should’ve been abundantly clear, Remus thought, canting up toward him to strike flint to tinder, but that it wasn’t was fitting: Black was no good at telling what others were feeling. He wasn’t much good at telling what he himself was feeling. Remus thought he understood it now, like this — the wild, confused excess, overmuch, unnamed, suffocating in its immensity… He tried words: “It’s good — like, tearing apart, like a cup running over — ” 

It seemed that was enough for Black to gather his sense of purpose and fuck like something was at stake. Remus pulled his knees back to his chest, ignoring the pain again, feeling with incredible magnitude the bare measurement Black could drive deeper now into that unnameable tear. The handsome face was contorted and stricken. “I want to feel you,” Black gasped alongside choked breaths. 

“You are — you are feeling me.” 

“No — I want, I want to feel what you feel…” 

He reached up and laced his hands behind Black’s neck and pulled him down to cover himself. Like this they were so close there was no hiding anything he felt. Every tiny gasp and moan and every sound of breath forced out of him and into Black’s ear. Any shame in it dissipated the closer the deep tear came to rending him entirely until at the last he heard his own wordless pleas as from another room and then the sharp white flare when the cup spilled over and spread. Black fucked him through it and then, impossibly, through another, shaking down, whiting him out; Black fucked him even after he himself had come, sliding his softening cock weakly through his own mess as though he had forgotten himself completely, as though he couldn’t stand to stop. Remus, floating as on some woozy drug high, could hardly feel it or anything anymore. At last they lay tangled together in the big bed. Drifting toward sleep he felt Black’s investigative touch between his legs, the pads of his fingers slipping gently inside, as if to confirm that it had happened at all. As if he couldn’t bear to be parted in this most intimate way. He dreamed of war happening somewhere else while they walked together in the woods. 

\--

Remus woke up alone in the bed when the rain got louder. Black was by the window naked; he’d opened it to get his owl inside. The thin grey light looked fine on him, like a mantle, or some painterly cast, almost like dust, diffuse across his skin, as though he were a marble statue on one of these untouchable lawns, frozen still in the gentle concentration and delicate suffering of love… he wondered if he was dreaming again for a moment. But then Black said his name. He leaned across the bed as he had the morning previous for a kiss but this time he was holding a bright red envelope which was addressed to Remus. The owl was watching them reproachfully from the windowsill. 

“Bloody hell,” Remus said, sitting up. It exploded in a riot of smoke and sparks and shouting the moment he touched it: 

_REMUS JOHN LUPIN YOUR EMPLOYMENT WITH THE NATIONAL BUREAU OF MAGICAL LAW ENFORCEMENT IS OFFICIALLY TERMINATED AS OF THIS MORNING TEN MAY NINETEEN FORTY THREE._

_YOU HAVE BEEN TERMINATED DUE TO VIOLATION OF CLAUSE 29C IN YOUR EMPLOYMENT CONTRACT WHICH REQUIRES ALL WEREWOLVES EMPLOYED BY THE MINISTRY OF MAGIC TO DECLARE THEMSELVES AT A SUPERVISED TRANSFORMATION FACILITY UPON EACH FULL MOON._

_YOU WILL NOT RECEIVE PAYMENT FOR THE REMAINING BALANCE OF PAY YOU HAVE ACCUMULATED._

His ears rang into the letter’s evaporation to ash on the bedspread. He had violated Clause 29C at least ten times before in his employment at the Ministry including upon numerous occasions as requested by his supervisor. This was a coup. Retribution. Black was watching him across the bed with a contagious too-much of feeling again in the quickly moving silver eyes. “We need to get the evidence,” Remus told him. 

He had seen this happen before. They would have written the Muggle captain too. They dressed quickly in their clothes from the floor and went out into the rain. It was early still and quiet on the street. “Will they fire me too,” Black asked him. 

“Probably.” 

“What are they going to tell the captain?” 

“Something terrible about me. Maybe something also about you.” Black’s eyebrows cocked up his forehead and he gestured between the two of them. The comparative and connecting movement which could be a sentence to death, castration, both, either. “Maybe,” Remus said. 

“How would they — ”

“They don’t have to prove it — they just have to say it. But they could prove it if they really wanted.” 

“How?” 

“Veritaserum. Or a Pensieve.” 

Black blanched thinking of the contents of his memory being so probed. Remus for his part thought he might be sick. “Christ,” Black said. “What are we going to do with the evidence?” 

“They’ll tamper with whatever they find. We need to take it somewhere and hide it. Not your flat. Where could we put it?” 

“James’s, in Gigmill. I’ve a key.” 

“Fine. Take the car, don’t Apparate.” 

“Don’t — they can _see_ where you Apparate!” 

“It’s an experimental spell developed for the — ” 

They turned the corner onto the street where the precinct was located. The lights were on inside shadowing movement in the rooms. Parked on the street out front was a single unfamiliar black car. 

Black for his part seemed not to have noticed. “Developed for what?” 

The sinking feeling sunk. Remus thought for certain now he would be sick. The front door of the precinct opened and onto the stoop stepped his boss at the National MLE, Robert Lansing, lighting one of his disgusting herbal cigarettes. There was a split second of pure and improbable stillness in which Remus turned to Black and attempted to communicate without words how completely and royally all was lost, and he felt like a physical blow that Black understood, because an unfamiliar calm resignation washed into the over-feeling behind his eyes, and something about it felt almost reassuring, to know for certain that at least in all the world there was one other person who also knew, and that this knowledge was certain, inviolable, a thread between them which could not be severed… 

Lansing noticed them from the stoop. “If it isn’t the man of the hour,” he announced with the self-importance befitting the third son of a middling pureblood family who stood to inherit neither lands nor title. 

“You fired me this morning, Rob,” Remus reminded him from the sidewalk below. The black car had the coded plates denoting it belonged to the national MLE, and had been outfitted with the spellwork necessary to transport a prisoner. “What else can I do for you.” 

Lansing descended the steps dramatically as though he were the protagonist of a jazz musical. The rest of his unit — Remus’s former coworkers — manifest from inside, carrying with them labeled boxes containing every shred of meticulously gathered evidence. “I find it difficult to overstate, Lupin, just how royally you’ve cocked this one up,” Lansing said. “You’ve managed to offend several extremely important people with extraordinarily baseless accusations. You racked up numerous violations of the International Statute of Secrecy, which, I’ll remind you, contains more stringent measures for wartime… You endangered the entire population of the West Midlands with your reckless failure to self-contain at the full moon… You _lost_ one of the Worcestershire Constabulary’s wizarding detectives down Knockturn Alley — and the other — let’s just say, you failed to notice what was directly under your nose all this time…” 

As though he were prepared to take a bullet Black muscled his way between Remus and Lansing. He was not exactly physically threatening and his inability to maintain eye contact didn’t help matters. Still he attempted: “I don’t know what you think you’re insinuating — ” 

Lansing produced from one of the deep pockets of his overcoat a cranberry velvet drawstring bag which he opened carefully. It had been magicked to hold items larger than itself and he reached in and drew out an object. Remus thought, inanely, of the jewelry rooms at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. There, perhaps, in the section where prehistoric ritual objects were kept, something like this might be begrudgingly displayed by a curator mindful of power over looks. Numerous items — strange beads, a piece of black fabric twisted into a floral approximation — were braided carefully into a skein of jet-black thread. But they were not beads, nor fabric, nor thread. The stuff of death was about it powerfully innate in everything that it was. And at the base where it narrowed into a point was a delicate, deeply curved bone. 

“We received a tip last night,” Lansing said. “We searched Black’s apartment in the wee hours. Rather odd, isn’t it, that he wasn’t there…” 

“It isn’t — ” Black stuttered. He took a step back away from Lansing and his shoulder jarred against Remus’s. “I’ve never seen that before in my life.” 

“We found thirty of them in your apartment.” 

Remus recalled with a strange clarity the day previous when Black had gone up to his flat to get his owl and had bade Remus wait in the backyard until he came back down. “It isn't him,” he said, still, somehow, for some reason. “This is a frame-up job — retribution, retaliation, obviously — ” 

“Do tell me how so.” 

“It’s all — you’ll see,” Remus said, “in the evidence…” 

In London, in the secret rooms underground, it would be doctored, destroyed. 

“We’ll review it,” said Lansing mildly. With incredible care he tucked the rosary back into the cloth bag. From the same pocket in his overcoat he produced a pair of magically enforced handcuffs. 

Black turned to Remus and met his eyes. He did not look away from Remus as Lansing secured the handcuffs and he did not look away as another officer opened the door of the black car and he still did not look away as that officer guided him to sit in the magically secured backseat so that his head didn't strike the edge of the door. It was the longest Black had managed to look at him and yet it said not much beyond shock, or perhaps because that was all Remus himself was feeling it was all he could see. Perhaps he had been reading all this time only what he wanted to — the echo of his self inside another. Perhaps it had been the first and greatest of all the several mistakes to even imagine such an echo might exist. 

He stood on the sidewalk and watched until the car which carried Black disappeared around the bend down the Hagley Road toward Birmingham. He stood there even after it was no longer visible. Eventually the rain cleared, and he went inside to see what might be salvaged. 

\--

\--

\--

In April 1944 Gray Reynolds left the manor house at Leasowes Park at three-thirty in the morning and climbed out over the low stone walls to the Hagley Road. He walked Westerly with his thumb out for a while until a black car stopped and he got in. It was driven by a woman in her mid-thirties who was going to Bobbington. They sat together in silence for a while until she said, “The Soviets have taken back the Crimea.” 

“Have they.” 

“Yes. It was in the paper this morning. They made it to Yalta.” 

Gray didn’t know where that was. His head hurt and he rested his temple against the window. 

“Where are you headed, son,” she said. 

“Hagley.” 

“Where in Hagley?” 

“You know the roundabout at Wassall Grove Lane?” 

“Sure.” 

“You could just let me out there.” 

“All right.” 

Some small unidentifiable animal crossed the road and she slammed the brakes on. It scampered in the thin light and they drove on again. 

“It isn’t safe,” she said, “for you to be out.” 

“I know that.” 

“You shouldn’t be out,” she told him. “You shouldn’t get in strange cars. Not around here.” 

“I don’t have a choice really,” Gray explained. He wondered if she might understand. Food wasn’t free. Neither was the supply of opium derivatives he and the survivors required to manage reality. Neither was the bribery of the necessary public officials to forge death certificates and leave the house unbothered, though this bribery might be conducted in other ways. It was certain that at least one of the women at the house in Bobbington did similar dangerous things for the sake of the rest. Perhaps it was this woman. After all, there weren’t many other reasons why one might be driving on the Hagley Road at four in the morning. 

“How old are you,” she asked him. 

“Eighteen.” 

“Don’t lie.” 

“Sixteen.” 

“And when — ”

“I was nine. How old were you?” 

“Six.” She took her eyes from the road to look him over. “Who bit you.” 

“His name was Yancey.” 

“John Yancey?” 

“Yeah — how’d you — ” 

“My housemate too — do you know her? Laura?” Gray shook his head. “She said she heard he died in the Blitz.” 

He had heard this too. There had been another boy who had stayed with them for a while who had been with Yancey when he had tried to create a new pack near Hull, but that was years ago. 

“What about you,” he asked the woman. “Who bit you.” 

“Greyback did. Have you heard of him?” 

“Sure. Did you meet the detective?” 

“Who?” 

“The detective — Lupin. He was one of Greyback’s too. He was around here for a while snooping. He stayed with us for a few months. But I haven’t seen him since the winter.” 

He had come struggling in shitfaced drunk in time for the full moon in May. Eventually they got him high enough that he told them he had called in Grimsby Accord violations on the Saunderses and the Reynoldses knowing that it would give the authorities an excuse to search the homes. He told them subsequently he had been exposed as a werewolf to his employer and fired. Select evidence had been destroyed and other pieces had been doctored or planted so as to frame one of the wizarding detectives in the Worcestershire Constabulary with whom Lupin had worked on the case, or maybe he hadn't been framed at all, and maybe he was somehow involved, depending on how much Lupin had been drinking. The other wizarding detective had disappeared down Knockturn Alley and as such the Constabulary was quick to appoint new officers, both pure-blooded veterans of non-combat units. Lupin had stayed until midwinter investigating alone to no avail, and he had disappeared on the night of the new moon. He hadn’t gone the way of the rest, by the timing of it. He had simply left. 

“He nearly got him,” Gray told her, “Lupin did. But they smoothed it over like it never was.” 

“I’ve seen him,” the driver told Gray. “He chased me in the Clent Hills.” 

“Who did?” 

“You know who.” 

“I’ve seen him too,” Gray said. “I see him all the time.” 

He had been in Leasowes that night. He was usually there. One time Gray’s father had even been there. If he recognized Gray he didn’t have anything to say about it. They were all drunk and handsy. He’d gone and hid himself in the coat closet until Saunders came and found him. 

“He has his pick,” Gray told her. “He’ll kill me when he gets tired.” 

They had come to the roundabout at Wassall Grove Lane. The driver pulled the car over to the side of the road. “How about you come back to Bobbington,” she said. She was trying very hard to keep the pleading motherly thing in her eyes out of her voice and he wondered if she had a child somewhere in another world from another life. “I’ll make you tea,” she said. “I can take you home in the morning.” 

“It is the morning. The sun’ll come up in — ” He looked up, but there were no stars. “A few hours.” 

He shut her car door but she didn’t pull away. He found the path by the light of the waxing moon and climbed the hill toward the obelisk. 

The night his father had been at Leasowes, he had gone home and made it all the way through the door before it was like he broke. It was dawn coming in jaggedly upon the moldy floorboards through the broken windows and Keith who was up already making tea had come and embraced him on the floor in the foyer. But now Keith was gone. He too had left. He had sent a letter from London and then they had spoken on the pay telephone at the station in Stourbridge Junction. Keith had called him by his real name which he never had before. “Come and stay with me in Hackney,” he said. He lived there in a tiny flat with four other boys. “After all the Blitz is over,” he said. He was talking very quietly and Gray wondered where he was. If it was raining where he was as it was raining where Gray was lashing the spiderwebbed glass of the red booth and fragmenting in sparks and shadows through it the headlights of cars waiting in the lot and passing on the street. 

“What am I supposed to do in London,” Gray said. He had used the last of his change on the telephone and the tide was going out on him. “I’m technically dead.” 

“You don’t need a birth certificate or anything like that to get a job on Diagon Alley.” 

“Really?” 

“You do need — well.” The pitch of his voice lowered. “You need a wand.” 

Something cold settled over him. He pinched the bridge of his nose. There was a car in the lot with the lights out; it had been there for a while, and there was a person inside. “Right,” he said. 

“Please,” said Keith on the phone. Then: “Graham.” Impossibly gently, as to a lover. No one had said it for many years. No one had said it since his mother — and he had woken up in the basement — Gray’s knees buckled. He allowed himself one soundless sob. 

“I have to go, Keith.” 

“No — just hear me — ” 

The phone made such a very loud sound in the receiver it almost shocked him. He sat on the filthy floor and put his forehead against the glass. After a little while the person in the car came to the door, but it was just a matronly laundress, who offered him half a thermos of sugary tea. 

He had hitchhiked home, and thought about going to London. He convinced himself that it was likely if he went to London he would end up doing the same thing again and he knew the devil here, he had known the devil here all his life. Besides if he left it was nearly certain the rest of them would die. As though they wouldn’t die, as though he too someday soon wouldn’t die, if he stayed. 

The obelisk at the top of the hill was shadows in the dregs of moon which in two days’ time would be new and around the yellow-gold fingernail-sliver of it the sky was purpling with dawn in pockets like a bruise in reverse. The weird spring dawn stars collapsing out by force of light. 

Keith had sent more letters after the phone call, and Gray had burned them without reading along with some of the other things which came by owl, mostly advertisements, and the occasional newspaper bearing dismal war news. He had also burned some of Lupin’s notes on a cold night when there had been nothing else for the fire. Lupin had taken some with him but others he had left and Gray had been just about high enough he convinced himself he could memorize everything before he burned it, and with the first few pages he had attempted. Then he felt he had to burn them to banish the memory. There was a sketch of the bones in the dirt and an estimation of their positioning inside the tree. A copy of the missing persons report of the woman who belonged to the bones whose name was Bella Jones. Lupin had noted in his distinctive heavily slanted hand that the police station in Sheffield had lost her photograph. 

They had met some of the women who lived in Bobbington when they lived up there along the Severn. Gray wondered if the woman from the car had known her. How many of them over those long untold years were dead. When they lived along the river sometimes the women had sent them crows with messages and groceries but they had told no one when they left by night for Cutnall Green. They had walked barefoot in the river like characters in a story fleeing hunters with dogs. 

At the top of the hill he waded through the long dew-wet grass and sat at the foot of the obelisk. There were lights in the hills heralding the coming dawn. He sat there for a while trying to talk himself out of doing what he had decided he would do when he climbed over the wall at Leasowes Park. When the first wash of color touched the eastern sky the thought had still not gone away. So he got up and brushed the dirt from his trousers and then he took from his pocket the stick of crumbling white chalk he’d taken from the garden shed at the manor house. The flank of the obelisk was fine smooth stonemasonry just damp enough from the night dew that the chalk went on in thick, bold white lines, vivid as ink in the first pale light. 

**Author's Note:**

> this story is based on a [real unsolved crime](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_put_Bella_in_the_Wych_Elm%3F). the current location of bella's skeleton and autopsy report is even still unknown. graffiti has appeared around the birmingham area and on the wychbury obelisk since 1944. 
> 
> other reference points: remus's experience at war is based to some extent on joseph heller's [catch-22](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catch-22). the [vinkt massacre](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinkt_massacre) was a real event which happened in belgium in 1940. 
> 
> thank you to [beta](http://piovascosimo.tumblr.com/) for the inspiration to write a weird wwii story, and also just for everything. you may want to check out [her amazing art](http://betamaya.tumblr.com/). 
> 
> if this story's Obvious Real World Parallels made you angry please consider donating (while charitable donations are still itemizable in your taxes!!!!!) to progressive organizations fighting this feeling that the world is friendly to a narrow subset of people only. [fandom trumps hate](https://fandomtrumpshate.tumblr.com/nonprofits) has a helpful list.


End file.
